


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

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Copyright No,. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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EDGAR ALLAN POE. In American Men of 

Letters Series. With Portrait. i6mo,giit top, 

$1.25. 
THE NORTH SHORE WATCH, AND OTHER 

POEMS. i6mo, boards, gilt top, 1.25. 
STUDIES IN LETTERS AND LIFE. Essays, 

i6mo, $1.25. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

Boston and New York. 



STUDIES IN LETTERS 
AND LIFE 



BY 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 





BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 



TS 33 <TI 
8<? 



.§7 



Copyright, 1890, 
B* GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY. 

All rights reserved. 



FOURTH EDITION. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by II. O. Houghton & Company. 



PREFACE. 



The following Essays are reprinted from 
The Atlantic Monthly and The Nation, 
with little more revision than was necessary 
to cover unimportant omissions or to com- 
bine, in one or two instances, kindred arti- 
cles. In the hope that they may afford some 
illustration, however fragmentary and inter- 
mittent, of the love of letters and of inter- 
est in ideal living, the author offers them to 
the reader. 

Beverly, July 12, 1890. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 
LANDOR 1 

Crabbe 29 

On the Promise op Keats 47 

Aubrey de Vere on Poetry .... 66 
Illustrations of Idealism. 

I. The Pergamon Marbles ... 85 
II. A Greek Trait noticed by Dr. 

Waldstein 89 

III. Mr. Pater on Ideal 2Estheticism . 98 

IV. Italian Kenaissance Literature . .112 
Remarks on Shelley. 

I. His Career 124 

II. His Acquaintances .... 133 
III. His Italian Letters .... 156 

Some Actors' Criticisms of Othello, Iago, 

and Shylock 167 

Sir George Beaumont, Coleridge, and Words- 
worth 188 

Three Men of Piety. 

I. Bunyan 209 

II. Cowper 219 

IIL Channing 227 

Darwin's Life 240 

Byron's Centenary 261 

Browning's Death 276 



CRITICISMS. 



LANDOR. 

Many of the most sensitive and dis- 
criminating critics of this century have, in 
the suffrage for fame, listed themselves for 
Landor. He seemed almost to achieve im- 
mortality within his lifetime, so continu- 
ously was the subtle appreciation of the best 
yielded to him, from the far-off years when 
Shelley used, at Oxford, to declaim with 
enthusiasm passages from Gebir, to the 
time, that seems as yesterday, when Swin- 
burne made his pilgrimage to Italy, to offer 
his tribute of adoration to the old man at 
the close of his solitary and troubled career ; 
and still each finer spirit, 

" As he passes, turns, 
And bids fair peace be to his sable shroud." 

During his long life he saw the springtime, 
and outlived the harvest, of the great poetic 
revival, and the labor of the Victorian poets 



2 LANDOB. 

of the aftermath was half accomplished be- 
fore his death ; but from all these powerful 
contemporary influences he was free. He 
remained apart ; and this single fact, attest- 
ing, as it does, extraordinary self-possession 
and assurance of purpose, suffices to make 
his character interesting, even were his work 
of inferior worth. As yet, however, even 
to the minds of cultivated men, he is hard- 
ly more than a great figure. He is known, 
praised, and remembered for particular 
scenes, dramatic fragments, occasional lyrics, 
quatrains. This is the natural fate of a dis- 
cursive writer. It matters not that Lan- 
dor was wide ranging ; it matters not what 
spoils of thought, what images of beauty, he 
brought from those far eastern uplands 
which it was his boast to haunt : he failed to 
give unity to his work, to give interest to 
large portions of it, to command public at- 
tention for it as a whole. Indeed, his work 
as a whole does not command the attention 
even of the best. What does survive, too, 
lives only in the favor of a small circle. He 
forfeited popular fame at the beginning, 
when he selected themes that presuppose 
rare qualities in his audience, and adopted 
an antique style ; but such considerations, 



LANDOB. 3 

at least in their naked statement, do not tell 
the whole story. Other poets have missed 
immediate applause by dealing with sub- 
jects that assumed unusual largeness of soul, 
range of sympathy, and refinement of taste 
in their readers: like Shelley, singing of un- 
heeded hopes and fears to which the world 
was to be wrought; like Wordsworth, nar- 
rating the myth of Troy. Other poets, in 
style, have set forth the object plainly, and 
left it to work its will on the heart and im- 
agination, unaided by the romantic spell, the 
awakening glow, the silent but imperative 
suggestion, the overmastering passion that 
takes heart and imagination captive ; and 
they have not lost their reward. A remote 
theme, an impersonal style, are not of them- 
selves able to condemn a poet to long neg- 
lect. They may make wide appreciation of 
him impossible ; they may explain the indif- 
ference of an imperfectly educated public; 
but they do not account for the fact that 
Landor is to be read, even by his admirers, 
in a book of selections, while the dust is 
shaken from the eight stout octavos that 
contain his works only by the professional 
man of letters. 

What first strikes the student of Landor 



4 LANBOB. 

is the lack of any development in his genius. 
This is one reason why Mr. Leslie Stephen, 
seizing on the characteristic somewhat rude- 
ly, and leaping to an ungracious conclusion, 
calls him " a glorified and sublime edition 
of the sixth-form schoolboy." Men whose 
genius is of this fixed type are rare in Eng- 
lish literature, and not of the highest rank. 
They exhibit no radical change ; they are at 
the beginning what they are at the end; 
their works do not belong to any particular 
period of their lives ; they seem free from 
their age, and to live outside of it. Hence, 
in dealing with them, historical criticism — 
the criticism whose purpose is to explain 
rather than to judge — soon finds itself at 
fault. When the circumstances that deter- 
mined the original bent of their minds have 
been set forth, there is nothing more to be 
said. With Landor, this bent seems to have 
been given by his classical training. To 
write Latin verses was the earliest serious 
employment of his genius, and his efforts 
were immediately crowned with success. 
These studies, falling in with natural in- 
clinations and aptitudes, pledged him to a 
classical manner ; they made real for him 
the myths and history of Greece and Kome ; 



LANBOB. 5 

they fed his devotion to the ancient virtues, 
— love of freedom, aspiration for the calm 
of wisdom, reverence for the dignity of he- 
roism, delight in beauty for its own sake; 
they supported him in what was more distinc- 
tively his own, — his refinement in material 
tastes, his burning indignation, his defense 
of tyrannicide. These characteristics he had 
in youth ; they were neither diminished nor 
increased in age. In youth, too, he displayed 
all his literary excellences and defects : the 
fullness and weight of line ; the march of 
sentences ; the obscurity arising from over- 
condensation of thought and abrupt and el- 
liptical constructions; his command of the 
grand and impressive as well as the beauti- 
ful and charming in imagery ; his fondness 
for heroic situation and for the loveliness of 
minute objects. This was a high endow- 
ment ; why, then, do its literary results seem 
inadequate ? 

With all his gifts, Landor did not possess 
unifying power. He observed objects as 
they passed before him at hap-hazard, took 
them into his mind, and gave them back, un- 
transformed, in their original disorder. He 
thought disconnectedly, and expressed his 
thoughts as they came, detached and sepa- 



6 LANBOU. 

rate. This lack of unity did not result sim- 
ply from his choice of the classical mode of 
treatment, or from a defect in logical or con- 
structive power, although it was connected 
with these. The ability to fuse experience, 
to combine its elements and make them one, 
to give it back to the world, transformed, 
and yet essentially true, the real creative 
faculty, is proportioned very strictly to the 
self-assertive power of genius, to the energy 
of the reaction of the mind on nature and 
life ; it springs from a strong personality. 
To say that Landor's personality was weak 
would be to stultify one's self ; but yet the 
difference between Land or the man and 
Landor the author is so great as to make the 
two almost antithetical ; and in his imagina- 
tive work, by which he must be judged, it is 
not too much to say that he denied and for- 
swore his personality, and obliterated him- 
self so far as was possible. He not only 
eliminated self from his style, and, after the 
classical manner, defined by Arnold, " relied 
solely on the weight and force of that which, 
with entire fidelity, he uttered," but he also 
eliminated self, so far as one can, from his 
subject. He did not bind his work together 
by the laws of his own mind ; he did not 



LANBOB. 1 

root it in the truth, as he saw truth ; he did 
not interpenetrate and permeate it with his 
own beliefs, as the great masters have al- 
ways done. His principles were at the best 
vague, hardly amounting to more than an 
unapplied enthusiasm for liberty, heroism, 
and the other great watchwords of social 
rather than individual life. These illumi- 
nate his work, but they do not give it consis- 
tency. It is crystalline in structure, beau- 
tiful, ordered, perfect in form when taken 
part by part, but conglomerate as a whole ; 
it is a handful of jewels, many of which are 
singly of the most transparent and glowing 
light, but unrelated one to another, — placed 
in juxtaposition, but not set ; and in the crys- 
talline mass is imbedded grosser matter, 
and mingled with the jewels are stones of 
dull color and light weight. A lovely object 
caught his eye, and he set it forth in verse ; 
a fine thought came to him, and he inserted 
it in his dialogues; but his days were not 
" bound each to each by natural piety," or 
by any other of the shaping principles of 
high genius. He was a spectator of life, not 
an actor in life. Nature was to him a pano- 
rama, wonderful, awful, beautiful, and he 
described its scenes down to its most minute 



8 LAN DOB. 

and evanescent details. History was his 
theatre, where the personages played great 
parts ; and he recorded their words and 
gestures, always helping them with the de- 
vice of the high buskin and something of a 
histrionic air. He was content to be thus 
guided from without ; to have his intellec- 
tual activity determined by the chance of 
sensation and of reading, rather than by a 
well-thought-out and enthusiastic purpose of 
his own soul. And so he became hardly 
more than a mirror of beauty and an iEolian 
harp of thought ; if the vision came, if the 
wind breathed, he responded. 

This self-effacement, this impersonality, 
as it is called, in literature, is much praised. 
It is said to be classical, and there is an im- 
pression in some minds that such an ab- 
dication of the individual's prerogatives is 
the distinctive mark of classicism. There 
is no more misleading and confusing error 
in criticism. Not impersonality, but univer- 
sality, is that mark ; and this is by no means 
the same thing, differently stated. In any 
age, the first, although not the sole, charac- 
teristic of classical work is that it deals with 
universal truth, of interest to all men : and 
hence the poet is required to keep to him- 



LANDOB. 9 

self his idiosyncrasies, hobbies, all that is 
simply his own ; all that is not identical with 
the common human nature ; all that men in 
large bodies cannot sympathize with, under- 
stand, and appreciate. Under these condi- 
tions direct self -revelation is exceptional. 
The poet usually expresses himself by so ar- 
ranging his plot and developing his charac- 
ters that they will illustrate the laws of life, 
as he sees these laws, without any direct 
statement, — though the Greek chorus is full 
of didactic sayings ; and he may also express 
himself by such a powerful presentation of 
the morality intrinsic in beautiful things 
and noble actions as "to soothe the cares 
and lift the thoughts of men," without any 
dogmatic insistence in his own person. In 
these ways -ZEschylus obliterated himself 
from his work just as much as Shakespeare, 
and no more ; Swift just as much as Aristoph- 
anes, and no more ; but the statement that 
Shakespeare or Swift obliterated themselves 
from their works needs only to be made to 
be laughed at. The faith of iEschylus, the 
wisdom of Sophocles, are in all their dramas ; 
Anacreon is in all his songs, Horace in all 
his odes. The lasting significance of their 
productions to mankind is derived from the 



10 LANDOB. 

clearness, the power, the skill, with which 
they informed their works with their per- 
sonality. These men had a philosophy of 
life, that underlay and unified their work. 
They rebuilt the world in their imagination, 
and gave it the laws of their own minds. 
Their spirits were active, moulding, shaping, 
creating, subduing the whole of nature and 
life to themselves. It is true that the an- 
cients accomplished their purpose rather by 
thought, the moderns rather by emotion; 
but this difference is incidental to the change 
in civilization. Either instrument is suffi- 
cient for its end; but he who would now 
choose the ancient instead of the modern 
mode, narrows, postpones, and abbreviates 
his fame only less than Land or, in his youth, 
by writing in Latin. Whatever be the 
mode of its operation, the energy of person- 
ality is the very essence of effective genius. 

That Landor had no philosophy of life, in 
the same sense as Shakespeare or iEscbylus, 
is plain to any reader. Those who look on 
art, including poetry, as removed from ordi- 
nary human life, who think that its chief 
service to men lies in affording delight rather 
than in that quickening of the spirit of 
which delight is only the sign and efflores- 



LANBOB. 11 

cence, would consider Landor's lack of this 
philosophy a virtue. It accounts largely for 
his failure to interest even the best in the 
larger part of his work, and especially for 
the discontinuity of his reflections. These 
reflections are always his own ; and this fact 
may seem to make against the view that he 
eliminated self from his productions so far 
as possible. But the presence of personality 
in literature as a force, ordering a great 
whole and giving it laws, is a very different 
thing from its presence as a mere mouth- 
piece of opinion. The thoughts may be nu- 
merous, varied, wise, noble ; they may have 
all the virtues of truth and grace ; but if 
they are disparate and scattered, if they 
tend nowhither, if they leave the reader 
where they found him, if they subserve no 
ulterior purpose and accomplish no end, 
there is a wide gulf between them and the 
thoughts of Shakespeare and iEschylus, no 
less their own than were Landor's his. In 
the former, personality is a power; in the 
latter, it is only a voice. In Landor's eight 
volumes there are more fine thoughts, more 
wise apothegms, than in any other discursive 
author's works in English literature; but 
they do not tell on the mind. They bloom 



12 LANDOB. 

like flowers in their gardens, but they crown 
no achievement. At the end, no cause is 
advanced, no goal is won. This incoherence 
and inefficiency proceed from the absence of 
any definite scheme of life, any compacted 
system of thought, any central principles, 
any strong, pervading, and ordering person- 
ality. 

In the same way the objectivity of Lan- 
dor's work, its naturalism as distinguished 
from imaginativeness, results from the same 
cause, but with the difference that, while 
the faults already mentioned are largely due 
to an imperfect equipment of the mind, his 
mode of art seems to have been adopted by 
conscious choice and of set purpose. The 
opinion of those who look on naturalism as 
a virtue in art is deserving of respect. We 
have been admonished for a long while that 
men should see things as they are, and pre- 
sent them as they are, and that this was the 
Greek way. The dictum, when applied 
with the meaning that men should be free 
from prejudice and impartial in judgment, 
no one would contest ; but when it is pro- 
claimed with the meaning that poets should 
express ideas nakedly, and should reproduce 
objects by portraiture, there is excuse for 



LANDOB. 13 

raising some question. No doubt, this was 
in general the practice of the ancients. The 
Athenians were primarily intellectual, the 
Romans unimaginative. But by the opera- 
tion of various causes — the chief of which 
are the importance bestowed on the individ- 
ual and the impulse given to emotion by the 
Christian religion — mankind has changed 
somewhat ; and therefore the methods of 
appeal to men, the ways of touching their 
hearts and enlightening their minds, have 
been modified. In literature this change is 
expressed by saying that the romantic man- 
ner has, in general, superseded the classical. 
The romantic manner aims at truth no less 
than the classical ; it sets forth things as 
they are no less completely and clearly. 
The difference is rather one of methods than 
of aims. The classical poet usually per- 
ceives the object by his intellect, and makes 
his appeal to the mind ; the romantic poet 
seizes on the object with his imagination, 
and makes his appeal to the heart. Not 
that classical work is without imagination, 
or romantic work devoid of intellectuality ; 
but that in one the intellect counts for more, 
in the other imagination. The classical poet, 
having once presented ideas and objects, 



14 LANDOB. 

leaves them to make their way ; the romantic 
poet not only presents them, but, by awaken- 
ing the feelings, predisposes the mood of the 
mind, makes their reception by the mind 
easier, wins their way for them. In clas- 
sical work, consequently, success depends 
mainly on lucidity of understanding, clear- 
ness of vision, skill in verbal expression ; in 
romantic work, the poet must not only pos- 
sess these qualities, but must superadd, as 
his prime characteristic, rightness, one might 
better say sanity, of passion. The classical 
virtues are more common among authors, 
the romantic far more rare ; and hence er- 
ror in the romantic manner is more frequent, 
especially in dealing with ideas. But with 
all its liability to mistake in weak hands, 
romantic art, by its higher range, its fiercer 
intensity, especially by its greater certainty, 
has, in the hands of a master, a clear in- 
crease of power over classical art, and under 
the changed conditions of civilization its re- 
sources are not to be lightly neglected. In- 
deed, one who voluntarily adopts the clas- 
sical manner as an exclusive mode seems to 
choose an instrument of less compass and 
melody, to prefer Greek to modern music. 
He sings to a secluded and narrow circle, 



LANDOB. 15 

and loses the ear of the world. Certainly 
Landor made this choice, and by it he must 
stand. 

Let us take an example from the best of 
Lander's work, and from that region of clas- 
sical art where it is wholly competent, — the 
brief description of small objects : — 

" The ever-sacred cup 
Of the pure lily hath between niy hands 
Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold." 

How completely, how distinctly, the image 
is given, — its form, its transparent purity, 
its fragile and trembling gold ! How free 
from any other than a strictly artistic charm ! 
And yet how different is its method of ap- 
peal from Shelley's 

" tender blue-bells, at whose birth 
The sod scarce heaved ; " 

from Shakespeare's 

"daffodils 
That come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty." 

Or, to select an illustration, also of Landor's 
best, when the image, no less objective, 
yields of itself an infinite suggestion : — 

" Borgia, thou once wert almost too august 
And high for adoration ; now thou 'rt dust. 
All that remains of thee these plaits unfold, 
Calm hair meandering in pellucid gold." 



16 LANDOB. 

Again, Low perfect is the image, how effec- 
tive the development of the third line ; how 
the melody of the last blends with, its se- 
lected epithets to place the object entire and 
whole before the mind ; how free is the qua- 
train from any self -intrusion of the poet! 
But here, too, the method of appeal is very 
different from Shakespeare's, as in the lines 
on Yorick's skull: "Here hung those lips 
that I have kissed I know not how oft." 
The difference in mood between these two 
only emphasizes the difference in method. 
Enough has been said, however, in descrip- 
tion and exemplification of the two kinds of 
art. Either is sufficient for its ends, nor 
would any one desire to dispense with that 
which has resulted in work so admirable as 
has been quoted from Landor. The distinc- 
tively romantic poets do not consign the clas- 
sical style to disuse. In the presentation of 
images, Keats has frequent recourse to it, as 
in his picture of Autumn lying 

" on a half -reaped furrow sound asleep, 
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook 
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers." 

So Wordsworth, in expressing ideas, is 
sometimes more bald than the least imagina- 
tive of the classics. But such poets do not 



LANDOR. 17 

employ this style alone ; they are character- 
ized by the modern manner ; they give us 
those " sweet views " which in the ancient 
mode "can never well be seen." Landor 
droops below his great contemporaries, not 
by merely adopting the classical method, 
but by adopting it exclusively. Whether 
this choice was entirely free, or partly de- 
termined by natural incapacity, is doubtful. 
Violent and tempestuous as his nature was, 
with all his boyish intensity of indignation, 
his boyish delicacy of tenderness, he seems 
to possess temper rather than true passion. 
In the verses to his poetic love, Ian the, there 
are many fine sentiments, graceful turns; 
there is courtliness of behavior; but the 
note of passion is not struck. lanthe is 
only another poetic mistress of the cavalier 
school, and in the memory her name is less, 
both for dignity and pathos, than Rose Ayl- 
mer's. Without passion, of course, a poet is 
condemned to the classical style. Passion 
is the element in which the romantic writer 
fuses beauty and wisdom; it is the means 
by which personality pervades literary work 
with most ease, directness, and glow. In 
the great modern poets it is the substance of 
their genius. But just as neither by a phi- 



18 LANDOR. 

losophy o£ life nor in any other way did 
Landor fill his subject with himself, so nei- 
ther by passion nor by any other quality did 
he breathe his own spirit into his style. 

The consequence is that Landor, unclas- 
sified in his own age, is now to be ranked 
among the poets, increasing in number, who 
appeal rather to the artistic than to the 
poetic sense. He is to be placed in that 
group which looks on art as a world re- 
moved ; which prizes it mainly for the de- 
light it gives ; which, caring less for truth, 
deals chiefly with the t beauty that charms 
the senses ; and which therefore weaves po- 
etry like tapestry, and uses the web of speech 
to bring out a succession, of fine pictures. 
The watchwords of any school, whether in 
thought or art, seldom awake hostility until 
their bearing on the details of practice re- 
veals their meaning. Art is, in a sense, a 
world removed from the actual and present 
life, and beauty is the sole title that admits 
any work within its limits. Of this there is 
no question. But that world, however far 
from what is peculiar to any one age, has its 
eternal foundations in universal life ; and 
that beauty has its enduring power because 
it is the incarnation of universal life. What 



LANBOE. 19 

poem has a better right to admission there 
than The Eve of St. Agnes? and in what 
poem does the heart of life beat more 
warmly? Laodamia belongs in that world, 
but it is because it voices abiding human 
feelings no less than because of its serenity. 
Nature in itself is savage, sterile, and void ; 
individual life in itself is trifling : each ob- 
tains its value through its interest to human- 
ity as a whole, and the office of art is to set 
forth that value. A lovely object, a noble 
action, are each of worth to men, but the 
latter is of the more worth ; and, as was 
long ago pointed out, poetry is by the limit- 
ations of language at a considerable disad- 
vantage in treating of formal beauty. But 
without developing these remarks, of which 
there is no need, the only point here to be 
made is that in so far as poetry concerns it- 
self with objects without relation to ideas, it 
loses influence ; in so far as it neglects emo- 
tion and thought for the purpose of gaining 
sensuous effects it loses worth; in both it 
declines from the higher to the lower levels. 
Landor, notwithstanding his success in pre- 
senting objects of artistic beauty — and his 
poetry is full of exquisite delineations of 
them — failed to interest men ; nor could his 



20 LANDOB. 

skill in expressing thought, although he was 
far more intellectual than his successors, 
save his reputation. Landor mistook a few 
of the marks of art for all. His work has 
the serenity, the remoteness, that character- 
ize high art, but it lacks an intimate rela- 
tion with the general life of men; it sets 
forth formal beauty, as painting does, but 
that beauty remains a sensation, and does 
not pass into thought. This absence of any 
vital relation between his art and life, be- 
tween his objects and ideas, denotes his fail- 
ure. There are so many poets whose works 
contain as perfect beauty, and in addition 
truth and passion ; so many who instead of 
mirroring beauty make it the voice of life, 
— who instead of responding in melodious 
thought to the wandering winds of reverie 
strike their lyres in the strophe and anti- 
strophe of continuous song, — that the world 
is content to let Landor go by. The guests 
at the famous late dinner-party to which he 
looked forward will indeed be very few, and 
they will be men of leisure. 

Thus far, in examining the work of Lan- 
dor as a whole, and endeavoring to under- 
stand somewhat the public indifference to it, 
the answer has been found in its objectivity 



LANDOB. 21 

and its discontinuity, both springing from 
the effacement of his personality as an ac- 
tive power ; or, in other words, in the fact 
that, by failing to link his images with his 
thoughts, and his thoughts one with another, 
so as to make them tell on the mind, and 
especially by eliminating the romantic ele- 
ment of passion, he failed to bring his work 
into sympathetic or helpful relations with 
the general emotional and intellectual life of 
men. 

Why, then, do the most sensitive and 
discriminating critics, as was said at the be- 
ginning, list themselves in Landor's favor? 
They are, without exception, fellow-workers 
with him in the craft of literature. They 
have, by their continued eulogy of him, 
made it a sign of refinement to be charmed 
by him, a proof of unusually good taste to 
praise him. His admirers, by their very di- 
vergence in opinion from the crowd, seem 
to claim uncommon sensibilities ; and the co- 
terie is certainly one of the highest order, in- 
tellectually : Browning, Lowell, Swinburne, 
to name no more. They are all literary 
men. They are loud in their plaudits of his 
workmanship, but are noticeably guarded 
in their commendation of his entire con- 



22 LANDOR. 

tents ; the passages for which they express 
unstinted enthusiasm are few. Landor was, 
beyond doubt, a master-workman, and skill 
in workmanship is dear to the craft ; others 
may feel its effects, but none appreciate it 
with the keen relish of the professional au- 
thor. The fullness, power, and harmony of 
Landor's language are clearly evident in his 
earliest work. He had the gift of literary 
expression from his youth, and in his mature 
work it shows as careful and high cultiva- 
tion as such a gift ever received from its 
possessor. None could give keener point 
and smoother polish to a short sentence ; 
none could thread the intricacies of long and 
involved constructions more unerringly. He 
had at command all the grammatical re- 
sources of lucidity, though he did not always 
care to employ them. He knew all the de- 
vices of prose composition to conceal and to 
disclose ; to bring the commonplace to issue 
in the unexpected ; to lead up, to soften, to 
hesitate, to declaim ; to extort all the supple- 
mentary and new suggestions of an old com- 
parison ; to frame a new and perfect simile ; 
in short, he was thoroughly trained to his 
art. Yet his prose is not, by present canons, 
perfect prose. It is not self-possessed, sub- 



LANDOB. 23 

dued, and graceful conversation, modulated, 
making its points without aggressive insist- 
ence, yet with certainty, keeping interest 
alive by a brilliant but natural turn and by 
the brief and luminous flash of truth through 
a perfect phrase. His prose is rather the 
monologue of a seer. In reading his works 
one feels somewhat as if sitting at the feet 
of Coleridge. Landor has the presence that 
abashes companions. His manner of speech 
is more dignified, more ceremonial, his enun- 
ciation is more resonant, his accent more ex- 
quisite, than belong to the man of the world. 
He silences his readers by the mere impos- 
sibility of interrupting with a question so 
noble and smooth-sliding a current of words. 
The style is a sort of modern Miltonic ; it 
has the suggestion of the pulpit divine in 
Hooker, the touch of formal artificiality that 
characterizes the first good English prose. 
Landor goes far afield for his vocables ; his 
page is a trifle too polysyllabic, has too 
much of the surface glitter of Latinity. But 
in the age that produced the styles of De 
Quincey, Ruskin, and Carlyle, it would be 
mere folly to find fault because Landor did 
not write, we will not say after the French 
fashion, but after the fashion of Swift, at 



24 LANDOB. 

his highest and on his level, the unrivaled 
master of simple English prose. Landor, at 
his best, is not so picturesque as De Quin- 
cey, nor so eloquent as Ruskin, nor so in- 
tense as Carlyle ; but he has more self-pos- 
session, more serenity, more artistic charm, 
a wider compass, a more equal harmony, 
than any of these. 

Landor pleases his fellow-craftsmen, how- 
ever, not only by this general command of 
language as a means of expression, but by 
the perfection of form in his short pieces. 
Perfection of form is the great feature of 
classical art ; it is an intellectual virtue, at 
least in literature, and appeals to the mind. 
The moderns are lacking in it. Landor's 
command of form was limited, insufficient 
for the construction of a drama ; impressive 
as Count Julian is, it has not this final ex- 
cellence. Landor's power in this respect is 
analogous to Herrick's ; it is perfect only 
within narrow bounds ; but it lacks Her- 
rick's spontaneity. His verses are not the 
" swallow flights of song ; " he was not a 
singer. The lyric on Rose Aylmer is en- 
tirely exceptional, and much of its charm lies 
in the beauty of the name, the skillful repe- 
tition, and, we must add, in the memory of 



LANDOB. 25 

Lamb's fondness for it. Familiar as it is, it 
would be unjust not to quote it : — 

" Ah, what avails the sceptred race ! 

Ah, what the form divine ! 
What every virtue, every grace ! 

Rose Aylmer, all were thine. 
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes 

May weep, hut never see, 
A night of memories and of sighs 

I consecrate to thee." 

Ordinarily, however, Landor deals with a 
beautiful image or one fine sentiment. His 
objectivity, his discontinuity, help him here ; 
they insure that simplicity and singleness 
which are necessary for success. The lack 
of any temptation in his mind to expound 
and suggest is probably one reason why he 
rejected the sonnet, certainly the most beau- 
tiful poetic mould to give shape to such de- 
tached thoughts and feelings. He scorned 
the sonnet ; it was too long for him ; he 
must be even more brief. He would present 
the object at once, instead of gradually, as 
the sonnet does; not unveiling the perfect 
and naked image until the last word has 
trembled away. His best work of this kind 
is in the quatrain, which is rather the moral- 
ist's than the poet's form, — Martial's, not 
Horace's. 



26 LANDOB. 

" I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. 
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art ; 
I warmed both hands before the fire of life, 
It sinks, and I am ready to depart." 

This is perfect ; but it is perfect speech, not 
perfect song. "When Landor had something 
to say at more length, when he had a story 
to tell, he chose the idyl ; and his work in 
this kind is no less perfect in form than are 
his quatrains. Indeed, on the idyls his 
poetic fame will mainly rest. They are very 
remote from modern life, but the best of 
them are very beautiful, and in the highest 
rank of poetry that appeals to the artistic 
sense. Those who are able still to hold fast 
to the truth of Greek mythology to the im- 
agination will not willingly let them die. To 
read them is like looking at the youths and 
maidens of an ancient bas-relief. The cul- 
tivated will never tire of them ; the people 
will never care for them. The limitations 
of their interest are inherent in their sub- 
ject and the mode of its presentation ; but 
these limitations do not lessen their beauty, 
although they make very small the number 
who appreciate it. 

Landor's influence over his critics is due 
chiefly to his power as a stylist, and to the 



LANDOB. 27 

perfection of form in his shorter poems and 
his idyls ; but something is also due to the 
passages which, apart from those mentioned, 
they commend so unreservedly ; such as the 
study of incipent insanity in the dialogue be- 
tween Tiberius and Vipsania, and the scenes 
from Antony and Octavius where the boy 
Csesarion is an actor. Not to be conquered 
by these argues one's self " dull of soul ; " 
and scattered through the volumes are other 
passages of only less mastery, especially in 
the Greek dialogues, which cannot here be 
particularized. For this reason no author is 
more served than Landor by a book of se- 
lections. After all, too, an author should be 
judged by his best. Nevertheless, when one 
remembers the extraordinary gifts of Lan- 
dor, one cannot but regret the defects of 
nature and judgment that have so seriously 
interfered with his influence. His work as 
a whole exhibits a sadder waste of genius 
than is the case even with Coleridge. There 
is no reason to suppose that the verdict of 
the public on his value will be reversed. His 
failure may well serve as a warning to the 
artistic school in poetry ; it affords one more 
of the long list of illustrations of that funda- 
mental truth in literature, — the truth that a 



28 LANDOB. 

man's work is of service to mankind in pro- 
portion as, by expressing himself in it, by 
filling it with his own personality, he fills it 
with human interest. 



CEABBE. 

"We have done with Crabbe. His tales 
have failed to interest us. Burke and his 
friends, as we all know, held a different 
opinion from ours ; and their praise is not 
likely to have been ill founded. The culti- 
vated taste of Holland House, thirty years 
later, is also against our decision. Through 
two generations of markedly different liter- 
ary temper Crabbe pleased the men best 
worth pleasingc Indeed, we owe him to 
Burke's approval ; for when Lord North, 
Lord Shelburne, and Lord Thurlow had 
neglected his entreaties for recognition and 
aid, and had left him to write, pawn, and 
go hungry, Burke saved him from the debt- 
or's prison, took him into his friendship, 
welcomed him to his home, and gave him to 
literature. 

Yet the verses which won this recognition 
from Burke, and gained for Crabbe, besides, 
praise from Johnson and talk with Fox and 
idle mornings in Reynolds's studio, were 



30 CRABBE. 

only his fledgeling flights. It was not until 
after more than twenty years of silence, 
spent in the obscurity of a country clergy- 
man's life, that he showed the richness and 
abundance of his vein. Then Burke and his 
friends had given place to those younger 
men, in whose lives a new age was dawn- 
ing ; but as warm a welcome awaited Crabbe 
among them as he had ever met with in 
Burke's club. With them he passed his old 
age, pleased with Byron's praise, and with 
the friendliness of Moore and Rogers, and 
with Scott's kindly regard and correspon- 
dence. They liked to see him, with his beau- 
tiful white hair, his formal, old-fashioned 
garb and old-school manners, the last of that 
long line of poets through whom the Queen 
Anne taste had tyrannized for a century in 
English verse, sitting familiarly among them- 
selves, who were preparing the way for the 
next generation to ignore the traditions 
which Burke and Johnson had fixed in his 
poetic faith. Especially did Sir Walter 
honor him ; like Fox, he chose Crabbe's 
poems to be read to him just before he died. 
Without reckoning the approval of others, 
what was the strong attraction in Crabbe's 
work for Scott and Fox ? Their judgment 



CRABBE. 31 

was not so worthless that it can be disre- 
garded with the complacent assurance with 
which the decisions of Gifford and Jeffrey 
are set aside ; on the contrary, Scott had 
such health and Fox such refinement that 
their judgment ought to raise a doubt whe- 
ther our generation is not making a mistake 
and missing pleasure through its neglect of 
Crabbe. 

Crabbe is a story-teller. He describes the 
life he saw, — common, homely life, some- 
times wretched, not infrequently criminal ; 
the life of the country poor, with occasional 
light and shadow from the life of the gen- 
tlefolk above them. He had been born into 
it, in a village on the Suffolk coast, amid 
stern and cheerless natural scenes : land- 
ward, the bramble-overgrown heath encom- 
passing crowded and mean houses; east- 
ward, — 

" Stakes and sea-weed withering- on the mud." 

Here he had passed his boyhood, in the 
midst of human life equally barren and 
stricken with the ugliness of poverty, among 
surly and sordid fishers given to hard labor 
and rough brawl, — 

" A joyless, wild, amphibious race, 
With sullen woe displayed in every face," — 



32 CBABBE. 

and the sight had been a burden to him. 
The desire to throw off this twofold oppres- 
sion of mean nature and humanity must 
have counted for much in determining him 
on that long - remembered December day, 
when, as the bleak twilight came down, 
darkening the marshy pool on the heath 
where he stood, he took his resolve to go up 
to London and seek poetical fame ; and glad 
at heart he must have been, that morning of 
early spring, when he left all this ugliness 
behind him. ignorant of the struggle and dis- 
tress he was to meet where he was going. 

In that early poem which Johnson praised 
Crabbe described this village life with the 
vigor of a youth who had escaped out of its 
dreary imprisonment, and without a touch of 
that tenderness for early associations which 
softened Goldsmith's retrospect of the scenes 
of his early days. Crabbe told of exhaust- 
ing labor leading on to prematurely useless 
and neglected age ; of storms sweeping away 
the shelter of the poor ; of smugglers, poach- 
ers, wreckers, tavern debauchery, and, worst 
of all, the poor-house — a terrible picture, 
perhaps the best known of all his drawing 
— with its deserted inmates cut off from all 
human care except that of the heedless phy- 



CEABBE. 33 

sician and the heartless parson ; a miserable 
tale, but too much of it only what his own 
eyes had seen. We do not know the con- 
tents of those piles of manuscripts which he 
wrote during his twenty years of silence, 
and — not much to the world's loss, some 
think — made bonfires of to amuse his chil- 
dren ; but his first poem after that long in- 
terval was the same story, the experience of 
those whose names appeared in the year's 
parish register of births, marriages, and 
deaths, and was a sorrowful survey of seduc- 
tion, desertion, crime, discontent, and folly. 
In his later tales he dealt less in unrelieved 
gloom and bitter misery, and at times made 
a trial at humor. There are glimpses of plea- 
sant English life and character, but these 
are only glimpses; the ground of his painting 
is shadow, — the shadow that rested on the 
life of the English poor in his generation. 

Where else would one turn for an ade- 
quate description of that life, or gain so di- 
rect an insight into the social sources and 
conditions of the Methodist revival, or into 
the motives and convictions of reformers 
like Mary Wollstonecraft ? Where would 
one obtain so keen a sense of the vast change 
which has taken place in the conditions of 



34 CBABBE. 

humble human life within this century ? 
Mr. Leslie Stephen, in that essay which is 
so good-humored but so unsuccessful an at- 
tempt to appreciate Crabbe, mentions the 
few illustrations in modern literature of the 
life Crabbe described ; it is seen in Char- 
lotte Bronte's Yorkshiremen, and George 
Eliot's millers, and in a few other charac- 
ters, " but," he says, " to get a realistic pic- 
ture of country life as Crabbe saw it, we 
must go back to Squire Western, or to some 
of the roughly-hewn masses of flesh who 
sat to Hogarth," The setting of Crabbe's 
tales has this special historic interest. The 
schools, houses, books, habits, occupations, 
and all the external characteristics of the 
tales belong to the time : the press-gang 
comes to carry off the lover just before his 
wedding-day, and leaves the bride to nurse 
an unfathered child, to receive the courtship 
of a canting and carnal preacher, and to find 
a refuge from him, and from the father who 
favors him, in suicide ; orphan boys are 
bound over to brutal task-masters ; pictures 
of the sects (from the pen of a respectable 
clergyman of the Established Church, it is 
true) recall the beginnings of Methodism 
with a vividness only to be equaled by the 



CEABBE. 35 

books and pamphlets of the early converts' 
own writing. This historic value of the 
tales, however, great as it is to the student 
of manners, is secondary to their poetic 
value, which lies in the sentiment, feeling, 
and pathos with which the experience of life 
embodied in them, the workings of simple 
human nature, in however debased surround- 
ings, is set forth. It is an experience which 
results usually from the interplay of low and 
selfish motives, and of ignoble or weak pas- 
sions ; it is, too often, the course of brutal 
appetite, thoughtless or heartless folly, ava- 
rice, sensuality, and vice, relieved too seldom 
by amiable character, sympathy, charity, 
self-sacrifice, or even by the charm of nat- 
ural beauty. Yet if all the seventy tales 
be taken into account, they contain nearly 
all varieties of character and circumstance 
among the country poor ; and, though the 
darker side may seem to be more frequently 
insisted upon, it is because the nature of his 
subject made it necessary, because he let his 
light, as Moore said, — 

" Through life's low, dark interior fall, 
Opening the whole, severely bright," 

rather than because he had any lack of 
cheerfulness of temper. 



36 CBABBE. 

Crabbe does not, in a true sense, give 
expression to the life of the poor ; he merely 
narrates it. Here and there, throughout the 
poems, are episodes written out of his own 
life ; but usually he is concerned with the 
experience of other men, which he had ob- 
served, rather than with what his own heart 
had felt. A description of life is of course 
far inferior to an utterance of it, such as 
was given to us by Burns, who dealt with 
the life of the poor so much more power- 
fully than Crabbe ; and a realistic descrip- 
tion has less poetic value than an imaginative 
one, such as was given to us by Wordsworth 
at his best. Crabbe's description is perhaps 
the most nakedly realistic of any in English 
poetry ; but it is an uncommonly good one. 
Realism has a narrow compass, and Crabbe's 
powers were confined strictly within it ; but 
he had the best virtues of a realist. His 
physical vision — his sight of what presents 
itself to the eye — was almost perfect ; he 
saw every object, and saw it as it was. Per- 
haps the minuteness with which he saw was 
not altogether an advantage, for he does not 
seem to have taken in the landscape as a 
whole, but only as a mosaic of separate ob- 
jects. He never gives general effects of 



CEABBE. 37 

beauty or grandeur ; indeed, he seldom saw 
the beauty of a single object ; he did little 
more than catalogue the things before him, 
and employ in writing poetry the same fac- 
ulty in the same way as in pursuing his fa- 
vorite studies of botany and entomology. 
Yet, with these limitations, what realist in 
painting could exceed in truthfulness and 
carefulness of detail this picture of a fall 
morning ? — 

" It was a fair and mild autumnal sky, 
And earth's ripe treasures met th' admiring eye ; 
The wet and heavy grass where feet had strayed, 
Not yet erect, the wanderer's way betrayed ; 
Showers of the night had swelled the deep'ning rill, 
The morning breeze had urged the quick'ning mill ; 
Long yellow leaves, from osiers strewed around, 
Choked the small stream and hushed the feeble sound." 

Or this sketch of light in a decayed ware- 
house turned into a tenement for the poor? — 

" That window view ! oiled paper and old glass 
Stain the strong rays, which, though impeded, pass, 
And give a dusty warmth to that huge room, 
The conquered sunshine's melancholy gloom ; 
When all those western rays, without so bright, 
Within become a ghastly glimmering light, 
As pale and faint upon the floor they fall, 
Or feebly gleam on the opposing wall." 

Nor is this carefulness of detail a trick, such 
as is sometimes employed, to give the ap- 



38 CBABBE. 

pearance of reality to unreal human life. 
Crabbe's mental vision, his sight into the 
workings of the passions and the feelings, 
although not so perfect as his physical vis- 
ion, was yet at its best very keen and clear ; 
the sentiments, moods, reflections, and ac- 
tions of his characters are seldom contrary 
to nature. It would be difficult to show a 
finer delineation of its kind than his descrip- 
tion of the meeting of two long-parted broth- 
ers. As Eichard approaches his brother's 
hall, he reflects, — 

" 'How shall I now my unknown way explore, — 
He proud and rich, I very proud and poor ? 
Perhaps my friend a dubious speech mistook, 
And George may meet me with a stranger's look. 
How stands the case ? My brother's friend and mine 
Met at an inn, and set them down to dine ; 
When, having settled all their own affairs, 
And kindly canvassed such as were not theirs, 
Just as my friend was going to retire, 

" Stay ! you will see the brother of our squire," 
Said his companion ; "be his friend, and tell 
The captain that his brother loves him well, 
And when he has no better thing in view 
Will be rejoiced to see him. Now, adieu ! " 

" 'Well, here I am ; and, brother, take you heed, 
I am not come to flatter you and feed. 
You shall no soother, fawner, hearer, find ; 
I will not brush your coat, nor smooth your mind; 
I will not hear your tales the whole day long, 



CBABBE. 39 

Nor swear you' re right, if I believe you wrong ; 

I will not earn my dinner when I dine 

By taking all your sentiments for mine ; 

Nor watch the guiding- motions of your eye 

Before I venture question or reply. 

Yet, son of that dear mother could I meet — 

But lo ! the mansion, — 't is a fine old seat ! ' 

" The brothers met, with both too much at heart 

To be observant of each other's part. 
' Brother, I 'm glad ! ' was all that George could say, 
Then stretched his hand, and turned Ins head away ; 
Richard, meantime, made some attempt to speak, 
Strong in his purpose, in his trial weak. 
At length, affection, like a risen tide, 
Stood still, and then seemed slowly to subside ; 
Each on the other's looks had power to dwell, 
And brother brother greeted passing well." 

These qualities of fine, true physical and 
mental vision are the essential qualities for 
valuable realistic work ; if there be room 
for regret in Crabbe's share of them, it is 
because their range is contracted. The lim- 
itations of his physical vision have been 
mentioned ; in respect to his mental vision 
Crabbe saw only a few and comparatively 
simple operations of human nature, — the 
workings of country-bred minds, not finely 
or complexly organized, but slow-motioned, 
and perplexed, if perplexed at all, not from 
the difficulty of the problem, but from their 
own dullness. Yet within these limits his 



40 CBABBE. 

characters are often pathetic, sometimes 
tragic, or even terrible, in their energy of 
evil passion or remorse. 

One other quality, without which clear 
mental and physical vision would be inef- 
fective, is essential to realism like Crabbe's, 
— transparency, the quality by virtue of 
which life is seen through the text plainly 
and without distortion ; and this is the qual- 
ity which Crabbe possessed in most perfec- 
tion. He not only saw the object as it was ; 
he presented it as it was. He neither added 
nor took away; he did not unconsciously 
darken or heighten color, soften or harden 
line. Whatever was before his mind — the 
conversation of a gossip, the brutality of a 
ruffian, the cant of a convert — he repro- 
duced truthfully ; whatever was the charac- 
ter of his story, mean or tragic, trivial or 
pathetic, he did not modify it. There was 
no veil of fancy, no glamour of amiable de- 
ception or dimness of charitable tears, to ob- 
scure his view : if he found nudity and dirt, 
they reappeared in his work nudity and dirt 
still; if he found courage and patience, he 
dealt the same even-handed justice. His 
distinction is that he told a true story. 

It was, perhaps, because he was thus able 



CBABBK 41 

to present accurately and faithfully the hu- 
man life which he saw so clearly that he won 
such admiration from Scott; for Scott had 
the welcome of genius for any new glimpse 
of humanity, and he knew how rare, and 
consequently how valuable, is the gift of 
simple and direct narration of what one sees. 
Fox had great sensibility and tenderness of 
heart ; and Crabbe presented the lot of the 
poor so vividly, so lucidly, so immediately, 
that he stirred in Fox the same feelings with 
which a better poet would have so charged 
his verses that natures not so finely endowed 
as Fox would have been compelled to feel 
them too. Scott and Fox knew what a val- 
uable acquisition this realistic sketch of hum- 
ble life in their generation was, so faithful, 
minute, and trustworthy ; they felt that 
their experience was enlarged, that real hu- 
manity had been brought home to them, and 
in the sway of those emotions, which Crabbe 
did not infuse into his work, but which his 
work quickens in sympathetic hearts, they 
could forgive him his tediousness, his fre- 
quent commonplace, his not unusual absurd- 
ity of phrase, his low level of flight with its 
occasional feebleness of wing. 

In their minds, too, his style must have 



42 CBABBE. 

had more influence than we are apt to think, 
— the style of the great school which died 
with him, the form and versification which 
they had been taught to believe almost es- 
sential to the best poetry, and from a tradi- 
tional respect for which they could hardly 
free their minds as easily as ourselves. 
Crabbe used the old heroic rhymed couplet, 
that simplest form of English verse music, 
which could rise, nevertheless, to the almost 
lyric loftiness of the last lines of the Dun- 
ciad ; so supple and flexible ; made for easy 
simile and compact metaphor ; lending itself 
so perfectly to the sudden flash of wit or 
turn of humor ; the natural shell of an epi- 
gram ; compelling the poet to practice all 
the virtues of brevity ; checking the wan- 
dering fancy, and repressing the secondary 
thought ; requiring in a masterly use of it 
the employment of more mental powers than 
any other metrical form ; despised and neg- 
lected now because the literature which is 
embodied in it is despised and neglected, yet 
the best metrical form which intelligence, as 
distinct from poetical feeling, can employ. 
Crabbe did not handle it in any masterful 
way; he was careless, and sometimes slip- 
shod ; but when he chose he could employ it 



CBABBE. 43 

well, and should have credit for it. To take 
one more example from his poems, how ex- 
cellently he uses it in this passage ! — 

" Where is that virtue which the generous boy 
Felt, and resolved that nothing should destroy ; 
He who with noble indignation glowed 
When vice had triumph ; who his tear bestowed 
On injured merit ? He who would possess 
Power, but to aid the children of distress ! 
Who has such joy in generous actions shown, 
And so sincere they might be called his own ; 
Knight, hero, patriot, martyr ! on whose tongue 
And potent arm a nation's welfare hung, — 
Where now this virtue's fervor, spirit, zeal ? 
Who felt so warmly, has he ceased to feel ? 
Or are these feelings varied ? Has the knight, 
Virtue's own champion, now refused to fight ? 
Is the deliverer turned th' oppressor now ? 
Has the reformer dropt the dangerous vow ? 
Or has the patriot's bosom lost its heat, 
And forced him, shivering, to a snug retreat ? 
Is such the grievous lapse of human pride ! 
Is such the victory of the worth untried! " 

Scott felt an attraction in such poetic form 
which we have perhaps ceased to feel ; and 
Fox, had he lived to read it, would equally 
have acknowledged its power. 

But Wordsworth said Crabbe was unpo- 
etical ; he condemned him for " his unpoet- 
ical mode of considering human nature and 
society ; " and, after all, the world has agreed 
with Wordsworth, and disagreed with Scott 



44 CBABBE. 

and Fox. Wordsworth told Scott an anec- 
dote in illustration of his meaning. Sir 
George Beaumont, sitting with himself and 
Crabbe one day, blew out the candle which 
he had used in sealing a letter. Sir George 
and Wordsworth, with proper taste, sat 
watching the smoke rise from the wick in 
beautiful curves; but Crabbe seeing — or 
rather smelling — the object, and not seeing 
the beauty of it, put on the extinguisher. 
Therefore, said Wordsworth, Crabbe is un- 
poetical, — as fine a bit of aesthetic priggish- 
ness as is often met with. Scott's opinion 
was not much affected by the anecdote, and 
Wordsworth was on the wrong track. It 
is true, however, that Crabbe was unpoet- 
ical in Wordsworth's sense. Crabbe had no 
imaginative vision, — no such vision as is 
shown in that stormy landscape of Shelley's, 
in the opening of The Revolt of Islam, which 
lacks the truth of actuality, but possesses 
the higher imaginative truth, like Turner's 
painting, or as is shown in that other storm 
in Pippa Passes. Crabbe saw sword-grass 
and saltwort and fen, but he had no secret 
of the imagination by which he could min- 
gle them into harmonious beauty ; there is 
loveliness in a salt marsh, but Crabbe could 



CRABBE. 45 

not present it, nor even see it for himself. 
As in landscape so in life. Goldsmith was 
untrue to the actual Auburn, but he was 
faithful to a far more precious truth, the 
truth of remembered childhood, and he re- 
vealed with the utmost beauty the effect of 
the subtlest working of the spirit of man on 
practical fact ; it is his fidelity to this psy- 
chological and spiritual truth which makes 
Auburn the " loveliest village of the plain." 
Crabbe exhibited nothing of this imagina- 
tive transformation of the familiar and the 
commonplace, perhaps saw nothing of it ; he 
described the fishing village of Aldborough 
as any one with good powers of perception, 
who took the trouble, might see it. Through 
these defects of his powers he loses in poetic 
value ; his poetry is, as he called it, poetry 
without an atmosphere ; it is a reflection, 
almost mirror-like, of plain fact. 

Men go to poetry too often with a pre- 
conceived notion of what the poet ought to 
give, instead of with open minds for what- 
ever he has to give. Too much is not to be 
expected from Crabbe. He was only a sim- 
ple country clergyman, half educated, with 
no burning ideals, no reveries, no passion- 
ate dreams; his mind did not rise out of 



46 CBABBE. 

the capabilities and virtues of respectability. 
His life was as little poetical, in Words- 
worth's sense, as his poetry. Yet his gift 
was not an empty one. Moore, Scott, and 
Byron were story-tellers who were poetical, 
in Wordsworth's sense ; but is Crabbe's true 
description of humble life less valuable than 
Scott's romantic tradition, or Moore's melt- 
ing, senuous Oriental dream, or Byron's sen- 
timental, falsely-heroic adventure ? It is far 
more valuable, because there is more of the 
human heart in it ; because it contains actual 
suffering and joy of fellow-men ; because it 
is humanity, and calls for hospitality in our 
sympathies and charities. Unpoetical? Yes; 
but it is something to have real life brought 
home to our tears and laughter, although it 
be presented barely, and the poet has trusted 
to the Tightness and tenderness of our hearts 
for those feelings the absence of which in 
his verse led Wordsworth to call these tales 
unpoetical. But it is only when Crabbe is 
at his best that his verse has this extraor- 
dinary power. 



ON THE PEOMISE OF KEATS. 

In the domestic, chatty, and nonsense por- 
tions of the letters of Keats, in their chaff- 
ing, their abandon, their unregarded laugh- 
ter (and admirable fooling they are, too), 
there is a spontaneous and irresponsible 
gayety, which, being quite natural only to 
the young heart and mind, charmingly dis- 
closes his youthfulness as a prime quality. 
Of all the famous English poets, he had most 
of the spirit of April in him. y His senses 
were keen ; his temperament was feverish, 
now jealous and irritable, and straightway 
humble and indulgent ; his imaginary joys 
and sorrows were spiritual possessions, sub- 
jecting him ; his humor was scampering, 
his fancy teeming, his taste erratic, his crit- 
ical faculty exposed to balking enthusiasms ; 
his opinions of men and affairs were hasty, 
circumscribed, frequently adopted unreflect- 
ingly at second-hand ; and, with all these boy- 
ish traits, he was extremely self-absorbed. 
At the centre of his individuality, never- 



48 ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 

theless, was the elemental spark, the sav- 
ing power of genius, the temperance, sanity, 
and self-reverence of a fine nature gradually 
coming to the knowledge of its faculties 
and unriddling the secret of its own moral 
beauty. *- Hence Lord Houghton, doing more 
essential justice to Keats than any of his 
louder eulogists, describes his works as rather 
the exercises of his poetical education than 
the charactery of his original and free pow- 
er ; and Matthew Arnold, even when plac- 
ing him with Shakespeare, excuses him as a 
'prentice hand in the wisest art. Too many 
of his admirers, seizing upon the external, 
accidental, and temporal in his biography 
and the fragmentary and parasitical in his 
poetry, have really wronged Keats more 
than did the now infamous reviews ; they 
have rescued him from among the cockneys 
only to confound him with the neo-pagans. 
In what did the promise of Keats lie ? 
The first step in the inquiry is the recogni- 
tion of his immaturity, — the acknowledg- 
ment that his memorials must be searched 
for the germ rather than the fruit. 

Sensuous Keats was, as every poet whose 
inspiration is direct from Heaven must be ; 
unfortunately, the extraordinary beauty and 



ON THE PBOMISE OF KEATS. 49 

facility of his descriptions of sensation, and 
his taste for climax and point in his prose 
have made it easy to quote phrases which 
seem to show that he was unduly attached 
to delights of mere sense. To pass by the 
anecdotes of Haydon, not too scrupulous a 
truth-teller, here is a characteristic para- 
graph written to his brother George : — 

" This morning I am in a sort of temper, 
indolent, and supremely careless ; I long 
after a stanza or two of Thomson's Castle of 
Indolence ; my passions are all asleep, from 
my having slumbered till nearly eleven, and 
weakened the animal fibre all over me to a 
delightful sensation about three degrees this 
side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl 
and the breath of lilies, I should call it 
languor ; but as I am I must call it laziness. 
In this state of effeminacy, the fibres of the 
brain are relaxed in common with the rest 
of the body, and to such a happy degree 
that pleasure has no show of enticement and 
pain no unbearable frown ; neither poetry, 
nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of 
countenance ; as they pass by me, they seem 
rather like three figures in a Greek vase, 
two men and a woman, whom no one but 
myself could distinguish in their disguise- 



50 ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 

ment. This is the only happiness, and is a 
rare instance of advantage in the body over- 
powering the mind." 

With siiniliar zest he enumerates the 
pleasures of drinking claret or of eating a 
peach, or he describes his " East Indian " 
to his brother's wife : " She kept me awake 
one night, as a tune of Mozart's might do. 
I speak of the thing as a pastime and an 
amusement, than which I can feel none 
deeper than a conversation with an imperial 
woman, the very 4 yes' and 'no' of whose 
lips is to me a banquet. . . . As a man of 
the world, I love the rich talk of a Char- 
mian; as an eternal being, I love the thought 
of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I 
should like you to save me." 

Such quick susceptibility to sensuous im- 
pressions of every kind may be plentifully 
illustrated by opening almost at random in 
his works. But the characteristics that mark 
the real sensualist — the content that the 
lotus-leaf vapors forth, the fierceness of the 
centaur's pursuit, the struggle of the faun's 
transformation — are nowhere to be found 
in the letters or the poems ; before his ill- 
ness, at least, there is no debility, irresolu- 
tion, or mastery of the instincts over the 



ON THE PBOMISE OF KEATS. 51 

mind. In fact, without any revolution of 
his nature, without the slightest effort, by 
mere growth it would seem, he passed on 
into the "Chamber of Maiden Thought," 
as he phrased it, and became absorbed as 
deeply in his reflections as previously in 
his impulses. At no time, indeed, was he 
wholly unthoughtful. The passages that 
have been given above are parenthetical, 
and should be read in connection with such 
as these, of the opposite tenor : — 

" I must think that difficulties nerve the 
spirit of a man ; they make our prime ob- 
jects a refuge as well as a passion." 

" I am becoming accustomed to the priva- 
tions of the pleasures of sense. In the midst 
of the world, I live like a hermit. I have 
forgot how to lay plans for the enjoyment 
of any pleasure. I feel I can bear anything, 
— any misery, even imprisonment, — so long 
as I have neither wife nor child." 

" Women must want imagination, and 
they may thank God for it ; and so may we, 
that a delicate being can feel happy without 
any sense of crime." 

" Scenery is fine, but human nature is 
finer ; the sward is richer for the tread of a 
real nervous English foot ; the eagle's nest 



52 ON THE PBOMISE OF KEATS. 

is finer for the mountaineer having looked 
into it." 

Many a remark, based like these immedi- 
ately upon his own experience, shows that 
Keats had an insight into his own life and 
an outlook on the world inconsistent with 
the portrayal of him as merely impassioned 
with sensuous beauty. 

So far, in fact, was Keats from being 
either lapped in Lydian airs or fed on food 
of sweetest melancholy that he was some- 
times a disagreeably unhappy person, if his 
brother George's description of him be en- 
tirely true, since his moodiness was vented 
in complaints, irritable jealousies, and like 
ways. However exceptional such occasions 
were in the intercourse of the brothers, this 
exposure, taken together with some of the 
upbraidings in the letters to Fanny Brawne, 
is very significant. Keats himself refers to 
the strain of morbidity in him, and, although 
from time to time he felt the strong awaken- 
ing of the philanthropic instinct, frequently 
expresses his distaste for society, his mis- 
anthropy, his indifference to the public, his 
wish to live withdrawn, free from human 
relations, engaged in poetizing for his own 
sake. Toward women especially he had a 



ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 53 

bitter tongue, before he fell in love with 
Fanny Brawne. 

" When I was a schoolboy, I thought a 
fair woman a pure goddess ; my mind was a 
soft nest in which some one of them slept, 
though she knew it not. . . . When I am 
among women, I have evil thoughts, malice, 
spleen ; I cannot speak or be silent ; I am 
full of suspicions, and therefore listen to 
nothing ; I am in a hurry to be gone. You 
must be charitable, and put all this perver- 
sity to my being disappointed since my boy- 
hood. Yet with such feelings I am happier 
alone, among crowds of men, by myself, or 
with a friend or two." 

He ascribes this peculiarity to his love for 
his brothers, " passing the love of women : " 

"I have been ill-tempered with them, I 
have vexed them, — but the thought of them 
has always stifled the impression that any 
woman might otherwise have made on me." 

He saw but little to choose, in his satirical 
moods, between men and hawks : — 

"The hawk wants a mate; so does the 
Man. Look at them both ; they set about it 
and procure one in the same manner ; they 
want both a nest, and they set about one 
in the same manner. The noble animal 



54 ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 

man, for his amusement, smokes a pipe ; the 
hawk balances about the clouds : that is the 
only difference of their leisures." 

Experience did not teach him more charity, 
though it made him more discriminating : — 

" The more I know of men the more I 
know how to value entire liberality in any 
of them. Thank God, there are a great 
many who will sacrifice their worldly inter- 
est for a friend. I wish there were more 
who would sacrifice their passions. The 
worst of men are those whose self-interests 
are their passions; the next, those whose 
passions are their self-interest. Upon the 
whole, I dislike mankind. Whatever people 
on the other side of the question may ad- 
vance, they cannot deny that they are always 
surprised at hearing of a good action and 
never of a bad one." 

This temper toward man in the abstract is 
the general feeling of which his mood toward 
the public is a special instance. He simply 
disregarded men who stood in no intimate 
relation to him, whether he met them in so- 
ciety or wrote verses for them to read. He 
was not, if his word be literally taken, sen- 
sitive to criticism or ambitious of popular- 
ity: he neglected the one because he put 



ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 55 

faith in his own judgment, and he despised 
the other because it was to be got at a vul- 
gar cost. His depreciation of the life of 
men, as he saw it, arose partly from a con- 
sciousness of power, partly from a sense of 
the distance between his thoughts and hopes 
and those of his fellows. The aloofness of 
genius he had in full measure. That curi- 
ously complex emotion, into which so many 
instincts and perceptions enter that it is 
scarcely analyzable at all, and is forced to 
go under the name of pride, was often dom- 
inant in his moods when others than his 
friends were before his attention. In short, 
Keats was as incompatible with his sur- 
roundings as ever any young poet left to the 
oblivion of his own society ; and he was as 
indignant at stupidity, as tired of insignifi- 
cance, as thoroughly world-weary, as a soli- 
tary enthusiast for the ideal could well be. 
In his last letter to George he sums the 
whole matter up more fully than at first but 
to the same purport : — 

" 'T is best to remain aloof from people, 
and like their good parts without being eter- 
nally troubled with the dull process of their 
every-day lives. When once a person has 
smoked the vapidness of the routine of soci- 



56 ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 

ety, he must either have self-interest or the 
love of some sort of distinction to keep him 
in good humor with it. All I can say is 
that, standing at Charing Cross and looking 
east, west, north, and south, I can see no- 
thing but dullness. I hope while I am young 
to live retired in tho country. When I grow 
in years and have a right to be idle, I shall 
enjoy cities more." 

In this opinion he did retire to one place 
or another, — the Isle of Wight, or Win- 
chester, or Teignmouth, and there isolating 
himself dreamed out his poems. He lived 
in a sort of ecstasy during no small portion 
of these solitary hours, when he could call 
the roaring of the wind his wife, the stars 
through the window panes his children, and 
rest contented in the abstract idea of beauty 
in all things. This absorption in the idea 
of beauty which determined the formulation 
of his creed in the oft-quoted lines, — 

" Beauty is truth, truth heauty, — that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know ; " 

which also led him into that much misunder- 
stood exclamation, " O for a life of sensa- 
tions rather than of thoughts ; " this intoxica- 
tion, as it were, with the loveliness of earth, 
was in his belief a true Pythian inspiration, 



ON THE PB0M1SE OF KEATS. 57 

the medium of the divine revelation. The 
world takes such expressions as extravagan- 
zas, or as mystical philosophy ; but to Keats 
they were as commonplace as the proverbs 
of the hearth; he meant them as entirely 
lucid expressions of plain sense. This point 
in the criticism of Keats has been too little 
insisted on and brought to notice. He put 
his faith in the suggestions of the spirit ; he 
relied on the intimations of what is veiled 
from full sight ; he had little patience with 
minds that cannot be content with half- 
knowledge, or refuse to credit convictions 
because they cannot be expressed in detail, 
with logical support, and felt with the hand 
of sense all round, if one may employ the 
phrase; in other words, he believed in the 
imagination as a truth-finding faculty, not 
less valid because it presents truth in a 
wholly different way from the purely logical 
intellect. This was the deepest and most 
rooted persuasion of his mind from the time 
when he first comes under our observation. 
To bring together a few expressions of it is 
the only right way of setting forth his creed 
in this matter. The following extracts are 
from various parts of his letters, from the 
earliest to the later ones : — 



58 ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 

" At once it struck me what quality went 
to form a man of achievement, especially in 
literature, and which Shakespeare possessed 
so enormously — I mean negative capability, 
that is, when a man is capable of being in 
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any 
irritable reaching after fact and reason. 
Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a 
fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the 
penetralium of Mystery, from being inca- 
pable of remaining content with half-know- 
ledge. This pursued through volumes would 
perhaps take us no further than this, that 
with a great poet the sense of Beauty over- 
comes every other consideration, or rather 
obliterates all consideration." 

" Many a man can travel to the very 
bourne of heaven, and yet want confidence 
to put down his half-seeing." 

" I never feel quite certain of any truth 
but from a clear perception of its beauty, 
and I find myself very young-minded, even 
in that perceptive power." 

" The whole thing must, I think, have ap- 
peared to you, who are a consecutive man, 
as a thing almost of mere words. But I 
assure you that, when I wrote it, it was a 
regular stepping of the imagination toward 
a truth." 



ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 59 

" What the imagination seizes as beauty 
must be truth, whether it existed before or 
not. . . . The imagination may be compared 
to Adam's dream — he awoke and found it 
truth. I am more zealous in this affair be- 
cause I have never yet been able to perceive 
how anything can be known for truth by 
consecutive reasoning, and yet [so] it must 
be. . . . However it may be, O for a life of 
sensations rather than of thoughts ! It is a 
4 vision in the form of youth,' a shadow of 
reality to come." 

A shadow of reality to come ! What a 
light that sentence throws on the aspira- 
tion for sensations rather than thoughts, for 
beauty rather than logic, for the sight rather 
than the inference, for the direct rather than 
the mediate perception of the divine ! So, 
at least, it is plain, Keats understood him- 
self; and whether one counts his faith a 
vague self-deception, meaningless except to 
a mystic, or has found the most precious 
truth borne in upon his heart only by this 
selfsame way, the recognition of the poet's 
philosophy not merely lifts Keats out of and 
above the sphere of the purely sensuous, but 
reveals at once the spiritual substance which 
underlies his poetry, and which gives it vi- 



60 ON THE PBOMISE OF KEATS. 

tality for all time. To other men beauty 
has been a passion, but to him it was a faith ; 
it was the substance of things hoped for, the 
evidence of things unseen, — a shadow of 
the reality to come. It was not, as with 
other poets, in the beauty of nature, the 
beauty of virtue, the beauty of a woman's 
face, singly that he found his way to the 
supra-sensible; he says in his most solemn 
words, " I have loved the principle of beauty 
in all things" Dying he said it proudly, 
as one who had kept the faith that was given 
him ; and since he chose that declaration as 
the summary of his accomplishment, it needs 
to be borne in mind, with all its large and 
many-sided meaning, by those who would 
pluck out the heart of his mystery. 

But although to Keats the worship of 
beauty in all things was the essence of his 
life, and the delight that sprang from it the 
essence of his joy, he did not find in these 
the whole of life. At first he had been sat- 
isfied if the melancholy fit fell on him, 
"sudden from heaven, like a weeping cloud," 
— eager to let the passion have its way 
with him, until it wreaked itself upon ex- 
pression; but he felt this overmastering of 
his own will an injury, not merely exhaust 
ing but wasteful. 



ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 61 

" Some think I have lost that poetic ardor 
and fire 't is said I once had ; — the fact is, 
perhaps I have ; but, instead of that, I hope 
I shall substitute a more thoughtful and 
quiet power. I am more frequently, now, 
contented to read and think, but now and 
then haunted with ambitious thoughts, . . . 
scarcely content to write the best verses for 
the fever they leave behind. I want to com- 
pose without this fever. I hope I one day 
shall." 

Similarly, he wishes to know more, and 
is determined to " get learning, get under- 
standing," if only that he may keep his bal- 
ance in the " high sensations " that draw 
him into their whirl. 

" Although I take poetry to be the chief, 
there is something else wanting to one who 
passes his time among books and thoughts 
on books. ... I find earlier days are gone 
by — I find I can have no enjoyment in the 
world but continual drinking of knowledge. 
I find there is no worthy pursuit but the 
idea of doing some good to the world. . . . 
There is but one way for me. The road lies 
through application, study, and thought. I 
will pursue it ; and, for that end, purpose 
retiring for some years." 



62 ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 

The years that should have perfected his 
powers were denied to him ; his account was 
made up. In these broken plans, however ; 
in this constant expansion of his view and 
faithful laying of his experience to heart ; 
in the wisdom of his interpretation of what 
came within his scope ; in a word, in his 
teachableness as well as in his steadier en- 
thusiasm, his uncloyed sensibility, his finer 
spirituality, as the promise of Keats seems 
brighter, so his worth seems greater. These 
letters show that more had passed into his 
character than was ever reproduced in his 
poems. We come back to Lord Houghton's 
decision. Fine as the work of Keats is, his 
genius was, nevertheless, 

" The bloom, whose petals, nipt "before they blew, 
Died on the promise of the fruit." 

It has been suggested in some quarters that, 
notwithstanding his early death, he would 
probably have done no better work, if in- 
deed he even maintained himself at the 
height he had reached. In support of this 
it is urged that Wordsworth's best poetry 
was written in youth, and that Coleridge's 
powers were employed on really excellent 
verse only for two years. These letters 
make it folly to entertain such a belief -, 



ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 63 

they (and the works too) exhibit not only 
an increase of intellectual, but also of artis- 
tic power. No criticism of his poetry is in- 
tended here ; but, in connection with this 
point, it may be remarked that his prin- 
cipal defect is in style, as is shown by the 
necessity he continually felt of studying lit- 
erary models, which nevertheless affected his 
productions hardly at all, except in linguis- 
tic handling, — in the choice and flow of 
words, after Spenser, the structure of sen- 
tences, after Milton, and later (in Lamia), 
after Dryden, and in a movement and kind 
of verbal espidt, after Ariosto. This restless 
change from one master to another, as well 
as some few critical remarks, indicates a 
power to form a distinctive style of his own. 
Again, the marked pictorial character of his 
poetry — the quality it has to impress one 
like a cartoon or a bas-relief (" the brede 
of marble men and maidens "), the grace of 
form and attitude in the figures of his poetic 
vision — was clearly recognized by him to 
be in excess in his compositions. Originally, 
this was due, in a high degree, to the acci- 
dent of his friendship with Hay don ; the 
portfolios of the masters helped his imagi- 
nation in definiteness, in refinement, and es- 



64 ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 

pecially in power of grouping. As the mind 
became more to him, and the eye less, he 
was dissatisfied with this trait of his works. 
He condemned even the most perfect com- 
position of this kind in English: "I wish 
to diffuse the coloring of St. Agnes' Eve 
throughout a poem in which character and 
sentiment would be the figures to such drap- 
ery." One who could speak of such a poem 
as "drapery" was far from the conclusion 
of his artistic education. Lastly, he was 
from the beginning ambitious of writing 
dramas. Otho and King Stephen are by no 
means unmistakable prophecies of success, 
had he continued in this hope. The effort, 
however, proves an interest in humanity of 
a different order from that shown in the 
mythological or lyrical pieces, and makes 
evident how far the naturalism of his pub- 
lished poetry was from expressing the full- 
ness of his mind. These three things — the 
incipiency of his style, the acknowledged in- 
sufficiency of picturesque art in creating the 
best poetry, and the ardent desire to deal 
with human life directly, and on the large 
scale, in the drama — are enough to convince 
us that Keats was truly a Chatterton, only 
less unfortunate, — " born for the future, to 



ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 65 

the future lost ; " one who, though he wears, 
Adonis-like, the immortal youth that lies in 
the gift of early death, would have been 
even dearer to the world, had his name lost 
in pathos and gained in honor, as it assur- 
edly would have done if his grass-grown 
grave wore the wheaten garland of England 
instead of the Roman daisies. 



AUBREY DE VERE ON POETRY. 

It is rare good fortune to find criticism 
in which the ideas are more excellent than 
the manner, and the spirit finer than the 
ideas ; in which it is not the keener sym- 
pathy of the poet that speaks, or the sure 
sense of the trained artist for expression, or 
any single faculty, but the whole nature of 
the man ; in which the judgment rendered 
does not proceed from any particular part 
of his mind — the scholarly or moral or aes- 
thetic element by itself — but is felt to be 
grounded upon his total convictions. Au- 
brey de Yere's essays, therefore, are worth 
more than ordinary attention. He writes 
principally of Spenser and Wordsworth, and 
also of Milton, Shelley, and Keats. He 
considers mainly the doctrine of this poetry. 
He values it chiefly for its highest office as a 
teacher of moral wisdom, and a quickener of 
the spiritual part of our nature. Pie justly 
decides that its real subject is man's life ; 
this is the centre of interest in all great 






AUBREY BE VEBE ON POETRY. 67 

thought, and the rest is but ornament and 
episode. He is a Christian idealist, and he 
refuses to regard poetry except in the light 
of those great ideas which belong to the 
spirit, and, being nobly and beautifully in- 
terpreted, are the substance of the poets 
who live by their wisdom as well as by 
charm. The ethical, the philosophical ele- 
ment in a large sense, is to him the engross- 
ing thing ; and criticism of this sort, so in- 
cited and so aimed, has a reality that does 
not fall far short of the worth of direct re- 
flection upon the things of the mind, though 
it deals with them through the medium of 
literature instead of in life itself. 

With Spenser, naturally, he has many 
affinities. The medievalism, the sentiment 
of chivalry, the allegorizing spirit, and not 
less the Puritan elevation of the first of the 
Elizabethan poets, exercise a special fasci- 
nation over a Catholic mind for whom the 
Ages of Faith, as he likes to call them, have 
in a peculiar degree the ideality that clothes 
the past. One no longer looks for original 
criticism of the father of English verse, 
who, more than Chaucer, may claim the pa- 
ternity of great poets in later days ; but to 
remind us of his excellence has become, in 



68 AUBBEY BE VEBE ON POETBY. 

the lapse of time and the decline of poetic 
taste, almost as desirable an office as it once 
was to unfold its secret. Spenser is a poet 
who requires no common critic to speak 
justly of him. His position was a unique 
one, and by some infelicity of his stars he 
failed to rise to the greatness which seems to 
have been possible to him. Aubrey de Yere 
remarks that the great romantic poem of the 
Middle Ages, one that should sum them up 
on the human as Dante did upon the divine 
side, was never written ; and, looking back, 
it appears to us that Spenser was the choice 
spirit that missed this destiny. His pure 
poetic quality, that sensibility to beauty and 
delight in it as in his element, was perfect 
to such a degree that Milton and Keats, who 
possessed it in something of the same meas- 
ure, seem almost to have derived it from 
him, whose poems nourished it in them. The 
sweetness and noble ease of his expression 
reveal the presence of a marvelous literary 
faculty. His responsiveness to the histor- 
ical and legendary elements in the past, his 
power of abstracting and idealizing them 
for poetic use, and his profound interest in 
human life, were great endowments, and he 
possessed in a high degree and a pure form 



ATJBBEY DE VERE ON POETRY. 69 

that moral reason which is the attribute of 
genius. But by defects as striking as this 
gift he made his poem less than we fondly 
think it might have been. The Elizabethan 
prolixity, the obscure perception of the na- 
ture of form in literary work, the artificial- 
ity incident to the allegorizing temperament, 
account for much of what he lost ; but, for 
all that, his poems are marvels of the crea- 
tive intellect, and it is this intellect that Au- 
brey de Vere dwells on. Any one can point 
out Spenser's loveliness, but the great spirit 
that brooded over his verse is not so easily 
realized. His aim was " to strengthen man 
by his own mind," and it is this effort which 
the critic analyzes, and by so doing tries 
to show how well he deserved the epithet 
"grave " as well as " gentle Spenser." 

His work, with its intricate allegory, its 
machinery of faeryland and chivalry, its 
ideal landscape, is regarded as remote from 
life ; but just as the creations of art, which 
also have this unreality, are yet the expres- 
sion, oftentimes, of the most real human 
feeling and the most substantial thought of 
the mind, so the figures of his embroidered 
poem compose a procession of true life. 
They are conceived and used in accordance 



70 AUBBEY BE VERE ON POETRY. 

with a comprehensive doctrine of the nature 
of humanity, which Spenser undoubtedly 
meant to enforce through the medium of the 
imagination ; this doctrine, in fact, is the 
stuff they are made of. 

It is not an easy thing to resolve into its 
moral elements the creations of a poet who 
blends many strains of truth. His method 
is not the consecutive process of logical re- 
flection and explication, but the simultane- 
ous embodiment of what, however arrived 
at, he presents as intuitive, needing only to 
be seen, to be acknowledged. In the analy- 
sis, the distinctive poetic quality is too apt 
to be dissipated, and the poet is forgotten in 
the philosopher. Certain broad aspects may 
be easily made out. Chivalry, with its crowd 
of faery knights, certainly rests, in Spenser's 
great work, upon the old conception of the 
Christian life as one militant against the 
enemies of the soul in the world ; and quite 
as clearly he also represents this life as be- 
ing, within the breast, ideal peace. Peace 
within and war without : these are two root- 
ideas out of which the poem flowers on its 
great double branches. He teaches specif- 
ically how to attain self-control, and how to 
meet attacks from without; or rather how 



AUBREY BE VERE ON POETRY. 71 

to seek those many forms of error which do 
mischief in the world, and to overcome them 
for the world's welfare. This is a bald state- 
ment, but it indicates well enough in what 
way Spenser employed the knightly ideal of 
succor on the one hand, and the Christian 
ideal of moral perfection on the other, in or- 
der to make a poem which should instruct 
as well as delight the world. He himself as- 
serts that his aim was so lofty, and to a man 
such as he was a lower aim, a merely artistic 
purpose, would have been impossible. It is 
fortunate that he was not less endowed with 
the sense of loveliness than with a serious 
mind ; for he thus illustrates not only the 
possible union of the two principal aims of 
poetry in all times, but also the truth that 
to a man whose perception of beauty is most 
perfect the beauty of holiness is the more 
impressive and authoritative in its com- 
mands. Aubrey de Vere devotes himself 
especially to the declaration and the proof 
that Spenser's poetic character was essen- 
tially that of a man deeply interested in 
human life, and he tries to prevent the 
poet's severely ideal, and sometimes fantas- 
tic, method from obscuring, as for many 
minds it does, the real nature of that alle- 



72 AUBREY DE VEEE ON POETRY. 

gory, so marvelous for invention, eloquence, 
and perpetual charm of style, which is sel- 
dom thought to be more than an intricate 
and lovely legend of the imagination. The 
critic is not blind to the great defects of the 
work, — and no poem of equal rank has 
more, — nor does he neglect the excellences 
that are obvious to the least thoughtful 
reader ; but he succeeds in placing before 
us its intellectual and moral substance. 

In doing this he reveals his own theory of 
poetry, and it is one that derives its philoso- 
phy from the great historic works of our lit- 
erature, and is grounded on the practice of 
the English masters whose fame is secure. 
Its cardinal principle is that man is the only 
object of interest to man, all else being sub- 
ordinate, and valuable only for its relations 
to this main theme ; and more particularly 
this subject is the spiritual life, not the ma- 
terial manifestations of his energies in deeds 
apart from their meaning. The Italian mas- 
ters of Spenser too often lost themselves in 
incident, in romance, in story for its own 
sake ; they were destitute of that ethical 
spirit which insists on planting in the deeds 
their significance, and regarding this as an 
integral, and indeed the only immortal, part 



AUBREY BE VEBE ON POETRY. 73 

of the action. The laws of life, not the 
chances of individuals, were Spenser's sub- 
ject, and in this he differs from Ariosto, and 
leaves his company. Spenser's genius was 
thus abstract and contemplative, and Pla- 
tonic in the sense that he used images always 
with some reference to the general truths 
that transcend imagination, and are directly 
apprehended only intellectually. Allegory 
was therefore his necessary method. Spen- 
ser never succeeded in harmonizing the dis- 
parate elements of the material to which he 
fell heir by literary tradition ; and besides 
the inconsistencies and incoherencies of the 
Renaissance culture, which never reached 
any unity in its own time, there were also 
special disturbances in his intellectual life 
because of the political and religious con- 
flicts in England itself, from entanglement 
with which he was not free ; and, moreover, 
he does not seem to have subdued the philo- 
sophical and poetic impulses of his own na- 
ture to any true accord. His poem, there- 
fore, did not take on that perfection, that 
identity of purpose and execution, which 
would have placed it in the first rank, and 
he remains below the supreme poets of the 
world. The study of his work, as an illus- 



74 AUBBET BE VEBE ON POETBY. 

tration of the conditions and art of poetry, 
is most instructive. Its defects teach more 
than its excellence, but they do not disturb 
the theory which Aubrey de Vere sets forth ; 
and he would be but a blind critic who 
should easily argue that Spenser succeeded 
when he obeyed the pure artistic impulse, 
and failed because of the interference of his 
graver genius with the poetical mind, his 
thought with his sensibility. 

Aubrey de Vere's contemplative mind, his 
strong hold on the abstract rather than on 
the concrete, help him over the poetically 
dry places in Spenser, and serve him even 
better in the case of Wordsworth. This is 
choosing the better of two alternatives ; for, 
if the landscape of Arcady is incomplete for 
him unless there is some "swan -flight of 
Platonic ideas " over it, such as he says is 
always in Spenser's sky, he has an appreci- 
ation for beauty as steadfastly as for the 
higher truths of life, and it is better to suffer 
with deficiencies in poetic art for the sake of 
the matter than to be content with art alone. 

The great difference between Wordsworth 
and Spenser is, that Spenser was concerned 
with the moral virtues and man's acquire- 
ment of them, while Wordsworth was more 



AUBREY DE VERE ON POETRY. 75 

narrowly limited to the influence o£ nature 
in forming the soul. Both looked to the 
same end, — spiritual life ; but Wordsworth 
had a different starting-point. His mind 
was more individual, and he assumed that 
his own history was typical ; he was less rich 
in the stores of antiquity, and he had less 
sensibility to beauty in its ideal forms ; but 
he knew the place that nature held in his 
own development, and he became specifically 
the poet of nature, not only as beauty visible 
to the eye, but also, and mainly, as an invis- 
ible influence in the lives of men. Much of 
his verse was a pastoral form of philosophy ; 
meditation counted for more than beauty in 
it ; but the scene was the English country, 
and the characters were rustics. There was, 
too, something of imaginative untruth in 
it, no doubt, similar to that inherent in all 
pastoral poetry. These common men, how- 
ever, were not individuals, but stood for 
man, and Wordsworth, in delineating their 
histories, was writing a parable as well as 
a story. In other portions of his verse he 
used a more abstract method. As a moral- 
ist he was much given to maxims ; and in 
all that concerns the social and political life 
of man, as well as his personal relations to 



76 AUBBEY BE VEBE ON POETRY. 

virtue, Wordsworth was, as the critic affirms 
with much emphasis, filled with a certain 
ardor, which may be called passion if one 
likes. The lack of passion in the ordinary 
sense — and it cannot be made out that 
Wordsworth possessed this quality — only 
renders more plain the moral endowment of 
the poet, his absorbing interest in the manly 
virtues, and the supreme value which he 
placed on the spiritual life and its ideal rela- 
tions. He considered these relations most di- 
rectly as existing toward nature, and having 
their operation in the emotion which nature 
excites. He did not altogether escape from 
the pantheism incident to such a constant 
preoccupation of the mind with the works 
and course of nature, and consequently he is 
less distinctively Christian than Spenser ; 
but Aubrey de Vere easily makes it out that 
W r ordsworth's philosophy, much as it differed 
from Spenser's, is concerned with the same 
topics of moral and spiritual life, and is the 
substance of his poetry. 

It is not surprising that a writer of Au- 
brey de Vere's temperament is annoyed by 
the charge that Wordsworth is destitute of 
"passion." He has much to say on this 
point. Wordsworth himself gave as the rea- 



AUBREY BE VEBE ON POETBY. 77 

son why he did not write love-poems the fear 
that they would be too passionate. Aubrey 
de Yere makes what defense he can by 
pointing out the half-dozen idealizations of 
woman in the shorter lyrics; but his real 
apology consists in the counter-assertion that 
Wordsworth is especially distinguished for 
" passion." He uses the word, however, 
with a difference, and means by it the poetic 
glow, the exaltation of feeling, the lyrical 
possession, which attends the moment of 
creation and passes into the verse. Of this 
sort of passion every form of poetry is as 
capable as is the amorous : the sceva indig- 
natio of satire would come under this head 
as properly as the moral enthusiasm or the 
patriotic fervor shown in the Ode to Duty 
or the Sonnets. Wordsworth truly possessed 
this capability, and it gives to his poems 
their masculine strength. Whether equal 
success is to be credited to the critic's glosses 
upon the more commonplace subjects of 
Wordsworth's muse, is doubtful; it seems 
rather that he makes the mistake which Cole- 
ridge attributed to Wordsworth himself, of 
giving a value to the idea which it has in his 
own mind, but which it does not have in the 
bare words addressed to the reader. When 



78 AUBREY BE VERE ON POETRY. 

the idea and the expression are not identi- 
cal, every poet suffers from this cause ; in 
his mind the idea, coming first, dignifies the 
words, but to the reader the words coming 
first, too often mutilate the idea. It is a 
good result of Aubrey de Vere's Words- 
worthianism that it gives him courage to 
force into the front of his essay the Orphic 
Odes, which are among the least known of 
the poet's work, and contain some of the no- 
blest of his lines. 

To Milton he seems somewhat unjust. 
The earlier poems receive his warm appreci- 
ation, but of the later ones he is hardly so 
tolerant, and nowhere does he give him his 
due. This is the passage : — 

" It is not, however, its deficient popu- 
larity so much as its subject and its form 
which proves that Milton's great work is not 
a national poem, high as it ranks among our 
national triumphs. Some will affirm that 
he illustrated in that work his age if not his 
country. His age, however, gave him an 
impulse rather than materials. Puritanism 
became transmuted, as it passed through his 
capacious and ardent mind, into a faith He- 
braic in its austere spirit — a faith that sym- 
pathized indeed with the Iconoclastic zeal 



AUBREY DE VERE ON POETRY. 79 

which distinguished the anti-Catholic and 
anti-patristic theology of the age, but held 
little consort with any of the complex defini- 
tions at that time insisted on as the symbols 
of Protestant orthodoxy. Had the Puritan 
spirit been as genuine a thing as the spirit 
of liberty which accompanied it ; had it been 
such as their reverence for Milton makes 
many suppose it to have been, the mood 
would not so soon have yielded to the licen- 
tiousness that followed the Restoration. . . . 
To him the classic model supplied, not the 
adornment of his poem, but its structure 
and form. The soul that wielded that mould 
was, if not exactly the spirit of Christianity, 
at least a religious spirit — profound, zeal- 
ous, and self-reverent — as analogous, per- 
haps, in its temper to the warlike religion 
of the Eastern Prophet as to the traditional 
faith of the Second Dispensation. Such was 
the mighty fabric which, aloof and in his 
native land an exile, Milton raised ; not per- 
fect, not homogeneous, not in any sense a 
national work, but the greatest of all those 
works which prove that a noble poem may 
be produced with little aid from local sym- 
pathies, and none from national traditions." 
Some expressions in this passage, and 



80 AUBBEY BE VEBE ON POETBY. 

many others scattered through these volumes, 
indicate where the current of sympathy was 
broken by default of which the critic under- 
stands Milton imperfectly. Ideal he was, but 
there is no poet who is more bone and flesh 
of the English nation in the substance of his 
genius, or in whom it developed a spirituality 
more noble ; nor are his defects, in his concep- 
tion of womanhood for example, such as can- 
not be easily paralleled from the other poets 
of highest genius in the line from Spenser. 
But, on the other hand, the critic is more 
than just to Keats, and towards Shelley he 
exhibits a respect, a penetration of the ele- 
ments of his thoughtful temperament, and a 
comprehension of the remarkable and inti- 
mate changes of his incessant growth, that 
are almost unexampled in authors writing 
from Aubrey de Vere's standpoint. In writ- 
ing of the others he has opportunity for still 
further illustration of the theory of poetry 
he holds, and he shows that these later poets 
have their best success the closer they keep 
to the subject of man, and the more they 
treat it with a pure, spiritual method ; while 
on the other hand, they are defective in pro- 
portion as they fail in this. 

It would be impossible for a critic with 



AUBBEY DE VEBE ON POETBY. 81 

such standards as these to pass in review the 
work of the moderns, and not to notice the 
general decline in the moral weight and the 
spirituality of late poetic literature. Mate- 
rialism, both as respects the objects of man's 
pursuit and the character of his speculation 
in philosophy, has been so important and 
growing a factor of the times, that, if there 
is any validity in this theory of poetry, it 
must follow that our poetic work has lost 
elevation, meaning, and utility. Religion it- 
self, so far as the general thought of nine- 
teenth-century civilization is concerned, has 
suffered a diminution of its authority, and 
consequently the spiritual life of man has 
filled a less prominent part in the eyes of 
these generations. 

In connection with this, room should be 
made for some original remarks of the wri- 
ter upon the Pagan element in our modern 
poetry. He is very well affected towards 
Platonism, and recognizes it historically as 
"the chief secondary cause of the diffusion 
of Christianity, doing for it more than the 
favor of Constantine could ever have done." 
He thus affirms for Greek religion and 
Greek philosophy " an element of greatness 
and truth." Our poets, in returning to its 



82 AUBREY BE VEEE ON POETRY. 

life and thought, seem to him to be making 
a return to the spiritual element which in 
the revolutionary ages has been obscured 
and too often lost. He speaks in this as a 
Catholic, but he is more Christian than 
Catholic, if it may be permitted to say so ; 
and all religious writers admit and lament 
the inroad of skepticism and consequent 
materialism. The turn he gives to these 
facts is a striking one : — 

"The arts of the Middle Ages soared 
above Paganism : the imaginative mind of 
modern times stands for the most part aloof 
from it ; but it often stands aloof from 
Christianity also. Secularity is its prevail- 
ing character, while even in Paganism there 
is a spiritual element. We may not, without 
a risk of insincerity and presumption, in- 
dulge in either an exultation or a regret 
higher than corresponds with our low posi- 
tion. Can we with truth say that the por- 
tion of our modern literature which reverts 
to ancient mythology is less religious than 
the rest ? Is it not, in the case of some au- 
thors, the only portion which has any rela- 
tions, even through type or symbol, with re- 
ligious ideas ? Would Dante, would even 
Milton, have found more to sympathize with 



AUBREY BE VEBE ON POETRY. 83 

in the average of modern literature than in 
Homer or in Sophocles, in Wordsworth's 
Laodamia or Keats's Hymn to Pan ? What 
proportion of our late poetry is Christian 
either in spirit or in subject — nay, in 
traditions and associations? Admirable as 
much of it is, it is not for its spiritual ten- 
dencies that it can be commended. Com- 
monly it shares the material character of our 
age, and smells of the earth ; at other times, 
recoiling from the sordid, it flies into the 
fantastic. . . . It is our life which is to be 
blamed ; our poetry has been but the reflec- 
tion of that life." 

This is valuable, not only for its sugges- 
tion, but because it sums up and speaks out 
plainly the protest which is implicit in all 
this criticism. The aesthetic lover of beauty, 
the artist who is satisfied with feats of poetic 
craft, will not find anything to his liking in 
Aubrey de Vere's essays. They are presided 
over by a severe Platonism intellectually, by 
an exacting and all - including Christianity 
when the subject touches upon man's life, 
and they will prove somewhat difficult read- 
ing, perhaps, because the thought continu- 
ally reverts to great ideas, to that doctrine 
of life which the author seeks for in the poets, 



84 AUBBEY BE VEBE ON POETBY. 

and prizes as the substance of their works. 
But it is well, in poetic days like these, to 
be brought back to the more serious muses 
which inspired the great ideal works of our 
literature, and to converse with them under 
the guidance of such a spirit as fills these 
essays with a sense of the continual presence 
in great literature of the higher interests of 
man, his life on earth, and his spiritual rela- 
tion to the universe. These essays contain 
the fruits of habitual familiarity with poetry, 
the convictions of a lifetime with regard to 
those things which are still important sub- 
jects of thought to thoughtful men; and 
there is, mingled with the style, the sweet 
persuasiveness of a refined and liberal na- 
ture, which is only too well aware that it 
must plead its cause, and pleads with 
strength and charm. 



ILLUSTKATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

I. THE PERGAMON MARBLES. 

The development of the Greek genius in 
sculpture, after it Lad passed its first ma- 
turity in Phidias and his immediate succes- 
sors, presented the same characteristic signs 
shown in the history of other modes of artis- 
tic expression in other nations. A reasoned 
conception of the ends and means, a trained 
appreciation of form, a complete mastery of 
technique, were inherited by the sculptors of 
Pergamon. The purpose being defined and 
the tools perfected, no originality was al- 
lowed them except in style ; and conse- 
quently their work, like the last dramas of 
Shakespeare, or the creations of Browning 
or Carlyle, exhibits an excess of subject, 
an effort to put the utmost of muscular 
action, of narrative import, of allegorized 
truth, into their marbles. And yet, in con- 
nection with this intensity, as it is called, it 
cannot fail to be observed that their sculp- 



86 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

ture (herein touched with the decadence) 
breathes the self-glorifying spirit of trium- 
phant skill, rather than the overmastering 
idealism of the earlier patriotic and religious 
motives. In their pictorial composition and 
landscape backgrounds, also, one is tempted 
to discern the harmful influence of that so 
vaguely known school of painting that flour- 
ished in the preceding period, and to piece 
out by conjecture our fragmentary concep- 
tions of its manner. It is complained that 
modern sculpture is too pictorial ; almost as 
soon as the art was recovered in Italy it fell 
into the same error, particularly in relief 
work ; but in Greece the profuse use of color 
on the marble, as ground and also for direct 
decoration, together with the employment of 
metals and jewels as additional adornment, 
must have brought the two arts so closely 
together that the transference of modes 
of treatment was inevitable. The striking 
thing is that painting, then as now, seems 
by its greater compass to overpower its more 
hampered rival. 

Besides this tendency to overtax the power 
of expression by the weight of subject, and 
this pride in mere technique in close associ* 
ation with a humiliating imitation of a dif- 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 87 

ferent art, these Pergamon sculptures dis- 
play other marks of being essentially quite 
modern. Their realism is especially notice- 
able. The Greeks of the elder time, it must 
be acknowledged, were remarkably fortu- 
nate in that their realistic spirit fell in with 
an actual existence which itself appealed 
to the imagination in many ways. In the 
Athenian prime the life that taught Sopho- 
cles and Agathon was heroic or idyllic, and 
needed hardly a touch to exalt its elements 
into the most imaginative idealism. When 
Plato could not write a dialogue without 
making a drama, nor Aristophanes compose 
a comedy without breaking into the sweetest 
lyric song, nor Phidias chisel a flying fold 
except for eternity, a presence was upon the 
earth and a spirit in men that made realism 
not less trustworthy as a guide to sculptors 
than is the "Look into thy heart and write" 
as a maxim for poets like Sidney. But 
when the barbarians broke in from the north 
upon Asia Minor, and the luxury of oriental 
manners and the fantasies of oriental mind 
stole upon the old order and changed it, to 
study the real was not necessarily to achieve 
the beautiful. The barbarians chiseled by 
the Pergamon sculptors are very different 



88 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

from those that once adorned the Parthe- 
non : they are fierce, ugly, portrait-like, stud- 
ied from the life. The giants, too, by the 
same artists are not even altogether human, 
as in the older reliefs, but many are mon- 
strous : conglomerates of snaky folds and 
Titanic limbs and ox necks, finny wings, 
pointed ears, horns, and such Egyptian and 
Assyrian confusions. For this debasement 
of the type, few will consider the wonderful 
finish, the minute and successful imitation 
of fur, scale, and stuff, a compensation. So, 
too, the representation of mortal agony is, 
in these works, carried to an extreme of 
truthfulness that is upon the verge of the 
revolting. This new bent of realism which, 
ceasing to select from the beautiful in life, 
now takes these three directions, — toward 
the portraiture of types not noble, toward 
the close copying of accessories not impor- 
tant, and toward the reproduction of shock- 
ing aspects of existence, — this essential dif- 
ference between the art of Athens and of 
Pergamon, it would be but too easy to par- 
allel in more than one province of our own 
intellectual life. These remarks, although 
they were not meant to point such a moral, 
incidentally illustrate how misleading is the 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 89 

the word " ancient " when applied to the 
Greeks. Wherever approached, they are as 
level to our own times in thought and deed 
as any of the so-called moderns : and though 
their language, in its former dialect, is dead, 
its golden words always fall upon our ears 
as if from the lips of some wiser contempo- 
rary. In looking on these recovered marble 
fragments, just as in reading the Antigone 
or Alcestis, the centuries seem meaningless. 

II. A GREEK TRAIT NOTICED BY DR. WALD- 
STEIN. 

One distinction between the Greeks and 
ourselves may be expressed by saying that 
our culture as a people rests upon literature, 
on the printed word, while that of the Greeks 
based itself rather upon observation, on the 
thing seen. The divergence of intellectual 
mood thus induced between ancient and 
modern is profound, and affects the whole 
higher life. In reflecting upon this classical 
trait, however, something is to be guarded 
against. It is well known that the illiter- 
ate, generally speaking, think in images, 
and that this power or habit of visualization, 
sometimes thought to be characteristic of the 
poet, be it observed, usually falls into disuse 



90 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

in proportion to the increase and continuity 
of exclusively literary culture in the individ- 
ual, until the point is reached at which a 
man thinks without having a single image 
definitely projected upon the mind's eye; 
his mental processes are, in fact, as colorless 
and formless as algebraic calculations. Mr. 
Galton's experiments in this matter are still 
fresh in our memories. Now it is not to be 
inferred that this was always the case, nor 
indeed that the intellect of highest develop- 
ment may not in the past, at least, have ha- 
bitually thought in images, as the unlettered 
do to-day ; and in Greece it appears that the 
picture language of the mind, as one may 
call it, held a place more important than 
with us, and perhaps equivalent to our own 
idea language. The Greek, as every one 
knows, peopled the earth with presiding ge- 
niuses, of more or less exalted rank, from 
Oread and Naiad, to the great Zeus of Olym- 
pus. These forms we call imaginary, and to 
our thought they are always tenuous ; the 
point to be remembered is that, when the 
Greek spoke of Athene, an image came be- 
fore his mind, and one not hypothetical and 
consciously symbolical, like Liberty with her 
cap, but definite, real, and awful, like the 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 91 

statue on the pediment or in the temple. 
The Greek mind leaned on these images as 
our mind does on the alphabet in all mental 
life; hence the poetry and the art of the 
age had a certain ease and naturalness, an 
intimacy with things seen by the eye, not 
equaled in the work of later times, except 
possibly in Italy. Dr. Waldstein points out 
that the most striking expression of this 
plastic necessity, inherent in Greek think- 
ing, is the doctrine of Platonic ideas. To 
the moderns, however tolerant they may be, 
there seems always a childishness, a gro- 
tesque quality, the more marked because 
of Plato's splendid and rich endowment, in 
the continual insistence in his philosophy on 
the " ideas " of the table and the flute, — the 
table without any definite number of legs, 
the flute without any particular quality of 
sound ; and the case is not much helped, 
even if one perceives, as Schopenhauer 
shows, that the doctrine is essentially ac- 
curate in truth, and wholly intelligible, since 
it is merely the modern statement of the sub- 
jectivity of time and space put conversely. 
Notwithstanding these admissions, our minds 
still find the Platonic ideas awkward to deal 
with. But that Plato, at the end of his ab- 



92 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

strusest speculations, and at the threshold of 
one of the greatest generalizations of the hu- 
man intellect, fell back upon the image-form- 
ing faculty, and insisted on particularizing 
the universal by means of a mystery or fic- 
tion of thought, is a crowning proof of the 
pervasiveness and inner mastery of the plas- 
tic spirit in the culture of his civilization. 

This trait of the Greeks has been dwelt 
on, in the present instance, less for itself 
than for its bearing on the idealism of the 
art of Phidias, of which the marbles of the 
Parthenon are the great examples. Of 
course Dr. "Waldstein, who knows the value 
of this supreme achievement of the idealistic 
temperament in man, is himself an idealist, 
and when he has occasion to analyze the 
monuments treats at more or less length of 
the theory of idealism. He distinguishes at 
once two kinds of physical representation, 
the portrait and the type, and affirms an 
analogous difference in representations of 
the spirit that animates the stone, — the 
man as he is, and the man as he ought to be. 
He observes, too, that the Greeks were fortu- 
nately supplied with subjects of sculpture in 
which both the physical and spiritual perfec- 
tion of man were proper elements, and, in- 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 93 

deed, requisite ; namely, the heroes and the 
gods. The higher life was the theme of 
their art in its greatest excellence, not as a 
possible but as an actual existence. This of 
itself was a valuable help to them, for cen- 
tres of imagination were thus determined 
for them and given a certain external valid- 
ity ; whereas among the moderns art is felt 
to be in its essence a mode of subjective cre- 
ation, having no reality except in thought. 
The resulting sense of uncertainty, the weak- 
ened faith in such emanations of man's 
brain, almost inevitable for the contemporary 
poet or artist, is one cause of the recoil of 
our imagination from the ideal, and of the 
attraction of realism for our writers, and 
perhaps of our content with a literature and 
art that will have fact for its province. 
" Let us have facts," is the cry ; " of truth 
— that is, the relation of facts — who can 
be certain ? Let us represent men as they 
are; of men as they ought to be who has 
any observation ? " And even within these 
limits of the new school it is said, further- 
more, that attention is to be paid to the in- 
dividual; not to man as he is, but to this 
man, taken at random, as he is. The type 
is too general to be depicted, too far re- 



94 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

moved from actual seeing, too much an ab- 
straction of the mind. It is plain that at 
the root of the difficulty felt by the realists 
who theorize in this way lies the conviction 
that the further the literary or any other 
representative art gets from the special fact, 
trait, or passion in its particular manifesta- 
tion, the more vague, doubtful, pale, rubbed- 
out, — in a word, the more generalized, — it 
becomes, and hence loses sharpness, vigor, 
and illusiveness. But with the Greek the 
case was clearly quite otherwise. There was 
no loss of individualization in the type, 
whether of physical or of spiritual perfec- 
tion. This Theseus or that Hermes is ideal ; 
both are generalized from men, but they 
suffer no loss of vitality thereby. The ideal- 
ism of Athens did not fade out in abstrac- 
tion, but embodied the permanent elements 
of harmonious beauty in body and spirit, in 
forms " more real than living man." The 
habit of thinking in images, or with fixed 
associations of images, with general notions, 
was one reason for this success, undoubt- 
edly; but before concluding that the liter- 
ary and rationalizing culture of our day for- 
bids us to hope for a similar blending of 
the type with individuality, let us remember 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 95 

that as with Phidias, so with Shakespeare : 
Hamlet is at once the type and the man. 
The poet born cannot turn aside, on this 
hand, into science, as the realists do ; nor 
on that hand, into philosophy, as the alle- 
gorists do. To him that ideal art alone is 
possible in which the two are united in the 
expression of permanent and universal truth 
through selected facts. 

Nevertheless, it may be urged, the Greeks 
passed rapidly from the idealistic to the re- 
alistic stage. And in connection with this 
one observes the happiness with which Dr. 
Waldstein identifies the elements of likeness 
between the Greeks and the moderns, just 
as he opposes their differences to each other. 
The most admirable example is an inquiry 
into the sesthetical qualities of the Hermes 
of Praxiteles, and in the course of it he de- 
lineates the characteristics of the age of 
Praxiteles, and parallels them with the traits 
of the time just subsequent to the French 
Revolution. In doing this he incidentally 
describes the common spirit in Shelley, 
Musset, and other representatives of an art, 
not of the noblest, but not of the worst 
either, of the interval after the great age, 
yet before the marked decadence. It may 



98 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

be said that the English never had an age 
of the Phidian kind ; in European culture 
that is to be sought, if at all, in mediaeval 
art. The Praxitelean age, however, was re- 
produced in essence in the first generation 
of our romantic period. A certain pathos, 
felt in view both of the world and of one's 
self, is perhaps its dominant quality, and 
with it go a sophistication, a self -conscious- 
ness, a reflectiveness, a slight yet not com- 
plete abstraction of the spirit from the ob- 
ject before it, illustrated by the expression 
of the head of Hermes in relation to the 
infant Dionysus on his arm. It is the mood 
of one whose spontaneous joy has been dis- 
turbed forever by thought. In such work 
one sees that the objective character of art, 
as it was in Phidias, is yielding to a new 
impulse ; that the hold of the imagination 
on the divine and the eternal is slowly relax- 
ing. At last, idealism went out in Greece, 
and, either in the shape of the portrait stat- 
ues, or of such sculptures as those of Per- 
gamon, realism came in to be the be-all and 
also the end-all of art. 

Why was it, one asks, that the plastic na- 
ture of the Greeks did not preserve them, if 
the image-making faculty did in fact count 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 97 

so much in their development? How did 
they come to lose the ideal forms that sprang 
in the mind of Phidias when he thought of 
beauty and virtue? One cannot say that 
idealism failed, for its triumph in the Par- 
thenon marbles marks the highest point ever 
reached by the human imagination in embod- 
ying its vision. It died out, and one says 
in explanation that the attention given to 
technique at last led to a disregard of the 
idea ; or that the mere ability to reproduce 
details exactly was a temptation to apply 
art to deceptive imitation of the seen instead 
of to an illusive expression of the unseen ; 
or that the age had lost the great ideas 
themselves, the perception of beauty and 
virtue, the belief in them and honor for 
them, and hence necessarily declined upon 
the things of this world, — that is, upon 
what is seen by the bodily eye rather than 
in the realm of thought and spiritual in- 
sight: and of these explanations perhaps 
one is as true as another, for they are all 
descriptions, from different standpoints, of 
what actually occurred. It is impossible, 
however, that in view of this history, and of 
the similar course in the development of 
mediaeval painting, one should not ask him- 



98 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

self whether the rise and defense of realism 
among us mean that literature is to follow 
in the same track, and die, as sculpture and 
painting died, until a new age shall set the 
wheel turning again ; for if the history of 
the arts teaches anything, it is that the ages 
of idealism are the ages of power, and those 
of realism the premonition and stiffening of 
death. 

III. MR. PATER ON IDEAL iESTHETICISM. 

The heart of Mr. Pater's Marius lies 
in his thought about the ideal, and it is in 
the nature of all such thought to make a 
peculiar demand upon the reader. Its wis- 
dom is felt to be, as it were, sacerdotal, and 
requires a conscious preparation of mind in 
him who would know of it; its vision is 
supernal, and disclosed only when some spir- 
itual illumination has been sent before. So 
runs a Platonic doctrine of election and 
grace that has been held as rigorously in lit- 
erature as in theology. This aristocracy of 
idealism — its exclusiveness, its jealousy of 
any intrusion of the common and worldly 
within the company it keeps, its sense of a 
preciousness, as of sacred things, within it- 
self — is incorporate in every fibre of Mr. 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 99 

Pater's work ; and he makes the demand 
natural to it, not only implicitly by an unre- 
laxing use of such aesthetic and intellectual 
elements as appeal exclusively to the subtlest 
faculties of appreciation in their highest de- 
velopment, but explicitly also by the charac- 
ter of his hero. Marius, before he became 
an Epicurean, was moulded for his fate ; his 
creator demanded an exceptional nature for 
the aesthetic ideal to react upon in a noble 
way, and so Marius was born in the upland 
farm among the fair mountains to the north 
of Pisa, and was possessed from boyhood of 
the devout seriousness, the mood of trustful 
waiting for the god's coming, which is ex- 
acted in all profound idealism. " Favete 
Unguis ! With the lad Marius there was a 
devout effort to complete this impressive 
outward silence by that inward tacitness of 
mind esteemed so important by religious 
Romans in the performance of their sacred 
functions." Marius was born one of the 
choice natures in whom the heavenly powers 
are well pleased ; and emphasis must be 
given to this circumstance because it follows 
that the ideal life which he lived, deeply 
meditated though it is, is really an individ- 
ual one. Marius is not typical, nor even 



100 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

illustrative in any broad way of the practice 
of aesthetic morals ; and yet, since he is not 
national, nor local, nor historic, in his essen- 
tial self, since he is more than an enlight- 
ened philosopher, and yet less than the en- 
lightened Christian, since his personality 
approaches the elect souls of other ages, 
other sentiments and devotions, and yet is 
without any real contact with them, he is 
typical and illustrative perhaps of something 
that might be. This confusedness of impres- 
sion springs from the fact that Mr. Pater, 
while he imagines in Italy, always thinks in 
London ; he has modernized his hero, has 
Anglicized him, indeed, and nevertheless has 
not really taken him out of the second cen- 
tury. It was a bold thing to attempt. It 
was necessary for his purposes as an evange- 
list of ideal living, and perhaps within the 
range of moral teaching it is successful ; but 
the way in which it was done is a main point 
of interest. 

A Roman Epicurean, one suspects, was 
not unlike the proverbial Italianated Eng- 
lishman. The native incompatibility be- 
tween the distinctive Roman temperament 
and the light-hearted gayety of Greek sen- 
suousness was similiar to that between the 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 101 

English and the Italian character in the 
later times; the perfection of Marius by 
means of a Greek ideal may run parallel 
with English culture under southern influ- 
ences. There was, too, in Roman character 
a trait or two which brings it near to quali- 
ties that lie at the base of our own stock. 
Even in the Italian landscape there are 
Northern notes such as Mr. Pater mentions 
when Marius, in his walks to the coast, sees 
" the marsh with the dwarf roses and wild 
lavender, the abandoned boat, the ruined 
floodgates, the flock of wild birds." We are 
told, also, that " poetic souls in old Italy 
felt, hardly less strongly than the English, 
the pleasures of winter, of the hearth, with 
the very dead warm in its generous heat, 
keeping the young myrtles in flower, though 
the hail is beating hard without." This 
note of Marius's home-life and the love he 
had for it, with his particular regard for 
"Domiduca, the goddess who watches over 
one's safe coming home," and with the ideal 
of maternity that grew up in his memory 
of home, — this peculiarly English note is 
struck in the opening and is dominant at the 
end. Certain other characteristics ally this 
Etrurian boy with that nobler strain of 



102 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

English blood, the Puritan strain as it was 
in Spenser. His instinctive seriousness, his 
scrupulosity of conscience, his inheritance of 
a certain sombreness from the stock that 
adorned the Etruscan funeral urns, his at- 
tachment to places and awe of some of them 
as sacred by the touch of a divine power, 
his sense of invisible enemies about his path, 
his rigorous self -discipline in preparation for 
certain hereditary sacred offices, a deadly 
earnestness at times, — as when he gazes so 
fixedly on the rigid corpse of his friend Fla- 
vian, — such are some of the traits that de- 
fine his nature as essentially rather North- 
ern than Southern, and. provide a ground of 
special sympathy and understanding for us. 
The second device by which Marius is 
modernized is by giving to him a power 
which, for one who runs as he reads, makes 
the character incredible. He is said to be 
affected sometimes in a way the opposite of 
the experience which many have who, on 
seeing a new place, seem to have been there 
before : Marius feels, in the most marked 
of his experiences, something that shall be, 
— he has always a prescience. Thus, in 
the cadence of Flavian's verses he hears the 
music of the Latin hymnology ; in the sight 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 103 

of his second friend, Cornelius, who displays 
and puts on his armor of a Roman knight 
in the dusty sunshine of the shuttered coun- 
try-house, he foresees the Christian chiv- 
alry ; in the faces and groups of the worship- 
ers in Cecilia's house he discerns the serene 
light and streaming joy of Giotto's and of 
Dante's vision, and looks on the Madonna 
and the Child that Raphael first painted. 
In all this there seems an unreality ; in 
the Puritan Roman, the Cyrenaic Christian, 
there is a sense almost of conscious artifice, 
as if one were being befooled. And yet, as 
for those Northern notes of landscape, cus- 
tom, and character, scholarship can give 
chapter and verse for them ; and as for the 
gift of prescience, — well, if it were impos- 
sible for Marius to have it, in a sufficient 
measure at least, then the theory of ideal 
living which he held to was at fault. And 
this Marius, so constituted, his creator places 
in an Italy over which the romantic desola- 
tion, which we know, was laying its charm of 
dreamful decay, and in a Rome which, then 
as now, was the huddled deposit of religions. 
The intellectual conviction on which Ma- 
rius conducted his life was simple and com- 
mon enough, as must be the case with every 



104 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

theory capable of being made a principle of 
living. The world is what we think it, and 
our part in existence is the fleeting moment 
of present consciousness. What shall be 
done with this moment ? Economize it, said 
Marius, in dissent from the Stoic who said, 
" Contemn it." Economize it ; make the 
most of the phenomena that arise in it, and 
see, so far as it depends on you, that these 
phenomena, both of sensation and idea, as 
they arise, are the most valuable possible to 
the moment ; and so your experience - — in 
other words, your life — will be the fullest 
and most refined. Above all, do not forget 
the main thing in this doctrine of economy, 
which is that the worth of experience de- 
pends, not on what it is at the moment in its 
detached and transitory phase, but on what 
it will prove in memory when it takes its 
place permanently and in relation to the 
whole of life. In such a scheme, receptivity, 
the most alert and varied powers of taking 
in impressions, is the one aim of cultivation. 
Here, too, much depended on the nature of 
Marius, this time on the side of his Southern 
endowment. An impressibility through sen- 
sation was his gift, his talent ; and especially 
he was susceptible to what the eye observes : 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 105 

he was one of those who are " made perfect 
by the love of visible beauty." This is the 
point of union of his life with the aesthetic 
ideal, and makes the story of it a path- 
way through scenes of loveliness not unlike, 
in a certain mild beauty, the frescoes on an- 
cient walls. The narrative is pictorial, al- 
most to the point of decoration, and moves 
always with an outlook on some fair sight. 
From the landscape of the villa where Ma- 
rius was born — among those delightful 
Etrurian hills whence one looks to the mar- 
bled rifts of Carrara gleaming above olive 
and chestnut slopes, and gazes off through 
the purple sea-valley of Venus's Port, the no- 
blest gateway of the descending sun — to the 
last throttling earthquake morning, a beau- 
tiful visible world is about us, and exercises 
its attractiveness both in nature and in hu- 
manity. The one end of Marius was to ap- 
propriate all this, to choose the best of sen- 
sation and its most nearly connected emo- 
tions, and to live in that. To do this in- 
volves a secondary talent, a gift of insight, 
a power to perceive relative values, which 
in reality means a faculty of moral discrim- 
ination ; and just here one may easily fail 
to see whence Marius derived this. 



106 ILLUSTBATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

Why was it, for example, that he, being 
so attached to sensation and the emotions 
that cling closest to it, rejected voluptuous- 
ness, with all its forms of beauty and joy ful- 
ness, as a thing essentially not beautiful nor 
joyful ? What was it that kept him, the 
comrade of Flavian, who represents the pa- 
gan surrender to this life, pure, — so pure, 
indeed, that with his visionary sense he fore- 
saw in chastity an ideal that was to be, and 
foreknew its coming beauty ? A mere inter- 
preter of character, an analyst, would say, 
that Marius obeyed in these choices his own 
nature, — that Puritan nature whose com- 
pulsion is always strong. He venerated his 
own soul and cherished its early instincts, 
and this was his salvation. But one might 
also give another explanation, which would 
seem more harmonious with the purpose of 
the author ; one might say that what is moral 
is in its outward manifestation so clothed 
with beauty, visible beauty, that the man who 
looks for beauty only, the noblest, the ideal 
beauty, will find therewith the highest, the 
ideal good. It is essential to such a seeker 
that he shall look with his own eyes and 
be frank with himself ; shall " look straight 
out " and acknowledge what he sees ; and 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 107 

this Marins does, thereby prefiguring in a 
way and practically making that " return to 
nature " which is the continually recurring 
necessity of all sincerity. If virtue does in 
fact wear this outward loveliness — and who 
would deny it ? — why may not the lover of 
beauty have truly seen the new and spring- 
ing forms of goodness, recognized them, and 
taken their promise into his life ? In other 
words, was not that prescience of Marius 
merely a power of clear and honest seeing 
of the elements of beauty and ugliness there 
before him ? 

That this is Mr. Pater's view of the mat- 
ter is indicated most definitely by the con- 
trast which he continually insists on between 
Marcus Aurelius and Marius, and which he 
brings out clearly in the attitude of these 
two toward the gladiatorial shows. In the 
amphitheatre Marius is conscious of the Em- 
peror, the strenuous Stoic, as " eternally his 
inferior on the question of righteousness." 
The young Epicurean has a " decisive con- 
science on sight " which is indubitable, — 
that conscience which, in its condemnation of 
the great sin of an age, is the touchstone of 
the select few in it, and makes them on the 
side of the future and aware of its excellence 



108 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

to be, when " not to have been, by instinctive 
election, on the right side was to have failed 
in life." Aurelius, we are told, made the 
great mistake : Vale, anima infelicissima 1 
is the last word of our author to him on the 
eve of the persecutions. And the reason is, 
that the Stoic was truly blind ; he had pal- 
tered with his senses until they lied to him, 
or spoke not at all. Marius saw the de- 
formity of the evil, and, while rejecting it as 
something he might not see and live, chose 
the good by its beauty, and so selected in 
the midst of that Roman corruption the 
Christian elements in whose excellence the 
Church would triumph and be made fair. 

There may be some surprise in perceiving 
in the evangel of sestheticism a morality of 
this height, a concentration of attention on 
the beauty of austerity, an exaltation of a 
noble Puritanism toward which the Cyrenaic 
ideal may lead. When this is understood, 
however, one finds it natural enough that 
the pervading tone of this history of an ideal 
life is really religious ; idealism, when it is 
living, cannot be otherwise than essentially 
religious. Nevertheless, it is a bold thing 
to put the question, as Mr. Pater implicitly 
does, whether an attention to the beautiful, 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 109 

to visible beauty, may not only be equivalent 
to moral discrimination and a safeguard of 
virtue, but also a mode of solving the ulti- 
mate religious questions of deity and man's 
relation to it. Marius does arrive at an in- 
timation, perhaps a faith, that a protective 
divine companionship goes beside him, and 
at an emotion of gratitude to that unseen 
presence. 

Two points only, in this wide branch of 
the speculation, can be dwelt on now. He 
says toward the end that he thinks he has 
failed in love ; and here he touches on one 
weakness of his ideal, for it is only by love, 
as he perceives, that any reconciliation be- 
tween the lover of beanty and the multitu- 
dinous pitiful pain which is so large a part 
of the objective universe can be obtained. 
The second weakness is perhaps greater. In 
his ideal there is both doubt and isolation ; 
the subjective element in his knowledge, the 
exclusive reliance on his own impressions, 
the fact that in metaphysical belief the 
world is only his world, and in actual living 
the experience is individual, — all this holds 
in it a basis of ultimate incertitude. True 
and real for him it no doubt is, but is that, 
indeed, the necessary limit of knowledge and 



110 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

life ? In effect, too, his creed is Protestant ; 
independently of the necessary element of 
doubt in it, it has the isolating force inev- 
itable to the believer who will accept only 
the results of his own examination by exer- 
cise of private judgment. This position is 
unsatisfactory ; and it seems to allow the 
rationality of that principle of authority by 
which an individual life obtains correction 
for its idiosyncrasies, cancels the personal 
error, and at the same time lets in upon it- 
self the flood of the total experience of hu- 
manity summed up and defined in the whole 
body of the elect. Though stated here in 
terms of the Stoical philosophy, this is the 
Catholic conclusion. Or, if Marius does not 
quite assent to this, he does accept it in a 
half-hearted way as an hypothesis which is 
worth making since it reunites him to man- 
kind. There is, it may be observed, a ten- 
dency toward Catholicism throughout the 
religious speculation. Another note of it, 
for example, is the attraction felt by Marius 
in the ritual of worship, as the perfection of 
that ceremonialism to which, in his boyish 
worship of the old gods, he was devoutly 
trained. 

After all, at the end one still states the 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. Ill 

promises of this aesthetic ideal, even when 
working on so unusual a nature as Marius's, 
interrogatively. Marius's life does not set 
it forth with convincing power. For one 
thing, it is not a vital life, but a painted 
one ; and there is an inconsequence in the 
series of pictures, — they do not seem to fol- 
low one another by any iron necessity. It 
would be foolish to complain that a life 
avowedly only receptive and contemplative 
of the beautiful is inactive. Marius does 
nothing except at the end. Yet, within such 
limits, one never sees how beauty affected 
Marius or developed his soul, and though he 
is said to have got much from companionship, 
one sees love operant in him very seldom, 
and then it is a very silent and unexpressed 
love. He repeats his own epitaph, — tristem 
neminem fecit, — and it was true ; but all 
his life seems negative, and continually one 
asks, How did he really live ? and gets no 
answer. His whole life was a meditatio 
mortis, — that is all that is told us. 

A sense of failure, or rather of incomplete- 
ness, oppresses one at the end of the narra- 
tive. Even granting that the success Ma- 
rius is said to have achieved — one is never 
quite sure that he did — by that exquisite 



112 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

appreciation of beauty and impassioned con- 
templation of its ideal forms, was, in fact, 
his; yet of what worth was it, — what did 
it mean to either God or man ? The North- 
ern idealist, the Puritan, cannot dispense 
with some serviceableness as essential to 
any high living. One should not push the 
point too far, however. Independently of 
all that has been said, any one who cares to 
think on counsels of perfection for man's 
life will find profound and original thought 
about the ideal elements still at hand in 
modern days for use, and many wise reflec- 
tions, sown in this history. It is a rare 
work, and not carelessly to be read. Some 
exquisiteness of taste, some delight in schol- 
arship, some knowledge of what is best 
worth knowing in the historic expressions of 
man's aspiration, and, above all, that "in- 
ward tacitness of mind " the reader must 
bring to its perusal. What of it? Have 
we not the highest authority for casting our 
pearls where Circe's herd cannot come ? 

IV. ITALIAN KENAISSANCE LITEKATURE. 

The traditional romance that hangs about 
Italy has fostered a popular misapprehension 
of nearly all things Italian. As the mother 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 113 

of Christian art and the Catholic Church, 
the land is supposed to be religious ; as the 
long-enslaved and last-freed of the nations 
of Europe, the race is believed to be defi- 
cient in political sagacity. Yet it requires 
but little reflection, hardly more than a 
thought of the Reformation, to prevent sur- 
prise at the fact that the Italians were at 
heart the most irreligious of Christian peo- 
ples, and that the Church, viewed by them 
always as a secular institution, is a monu- 
ment of their genius applied to practical 
affairs. Italian art, too, as an expression of 
national life, must be ascribed less to piety 
than to the native beut of mind, the inbred 
race disposition, which seeks to bring all 
spiritual things within the perception of the 
senses ; indeed, the course of development 
in Italian art lies principally in the gradual 
substitution of an aesthetic aim for a devout 
motive as the source of inspiration. No 
people is less dreamy, in the Northern sense ; 
the genius of the race is positive, definite, 
objective, practical, circumscribed in the 
tangible and visible facts of experience. Be- 
tween Italian intellect and Italian feeling 
there seems to be no border-land. Ecstasy 
may fall from heaven and kindle masses of 



114 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

men into passion, as in the case of the Fla- 
gellanti, but it is a malady of emotion only ; 
the madness passes, the mind remains un- 
touched. In Dante's poem, as has been 
often pointed out, these race qualities are 
clearly apparent : the journey is mapped out 
as on a chart ; the hours are duly reckoned ; 
the world beyond is laid open to accurate 
observation ; the dark places of his Comedy 
are not dark with the spirit's excess of light, 
but with mediaeval metaphysics. In later 
authors, however different the subject, the 
temper of mind is the same. The grasp on 
reality is no less tenacious, the attention to 
detail no less careful; the incidents of the 
adventure, the look of the landscape, the 
physiognomy of the characters, no less 
plainly defined as phenomena ocularly seen. 
In the poems of chivalry, whether roman- 
tic, heroic, or burlesque, which seem to pos- 
sess the characteristics of later Italian litera- 
ture in most variety, this realism is veiled by 
the apparent unreality of the fable. Arthur 
and Roland belong to the North ; and to the 
Northern mind itself, although they have 
the substance of ideals, they are very re- 
mote. But the Arthur of Italian nobles, 
the Roland of the Italian people, are the 



ILLUSTBATIONS OF IDEALISM. 115 

thinnest of shades ; nor were they less in- 
substantial to most of the poets of the golden 
age than to us. The people gave the Caro- 
lingian myth to them as the burden of their 
stories ; but, leaving Boiardo out of the ac- 
count, they could not accept the conditions 
of that imaginative world and believe in it ; 
nor could Boiardo, who had without doubt 
a real enthusiasm for chivalry, believe with 
Spenser's faith. Italy had no feudal past ; 
how could the citizen Pulci feel any living- 
sympathy with feudal ideals ? The myth 
was emptied of its moral contents; how 
could Ariosto be earnest as Tennyson is? 
In dealing with deeds of knight-errantry, 
adventures in the lists and the forest, wizard 
springs and invincible armor, all the poets 
were conscious of something quixotic ; to 
Ariosto it was the main element. He could 
not be serious ; the mock gravity of irony 
was the most he could compass. This sense 
of unreality in the legend was not all that 
led the last poets of the age especially to 
play with their art. A more powerful rea- 
son was the hopelessness of society in their 
age, deep as that which in earlier times fell 
on their ancestors, who witnessed the barba- 
rian incursions on Roman soil. Politically, 



116 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

morally, and religiously, society was break- 
ing up. What was there to be serious about ? 
All that gives meaning to life was gone: 
the ties of family, country, and God were 
snapped. What better thing was there to 
do than to retire to the country, and let the 
world go " the primrose path " ? The strik- 
ing thing in all this is, that the sense of the 
pleasure to be derived from the refinements 
of culture excluded from the minds of nearly 
all the most gifted Italians that gloom, which 
would have wrapped a Northern nation, at 
the sight of an anarchy which, if less terrible 
with blood than the French Revolution, was 
more appalling to the spirit. The Italians, 
however, went to their villas, to hear Ban- 
dello tell stories and Berni read verses. The 
City of the Plague, from which Boccaccio's 
garden party fled, is the permanent back- 
ground of this golden age. 

Life was something left behind, but art 
remained ; and for the purposes of art, 
whose function was entertainment, the ad- 
ventures of Orlando and his like were suf- 
ficiently serviceable. Such myths afforded 
opportunity for inexhaustible invention of 
incident, for the play of fancy, and the exhi- 
bition of the courtesies and humors of life ; 



ILLUSTBATIONS OF IDEALISM. 117 

and should there he a lapse into serious- 
ness, there was room for satire on the clergy, 
and for sentiments of the Reformation. 
These tales, it is true, were products of cul- 
ture separated from the realities of society, 
and neglectful of them ; but they were not, 
as might have been anticipated, expressive 
of individual rather than national tempera- 
ment. They are prominently characterized 
by the Italian love of incident, pictures, and 
fun. The incidents are invented for their 
own sake, not to develop character or exhibit 
it in action ; they are only adventures, hap- 
penings, skillfully interwoven and rapidly 
passed ; but amid them the conduct of the 
personages is true Italian, realistic. In pre- 
senting these incidents, and the scenes in 
which they take place, the poets, as Lessing 
complained, adopt pictorial methods: they 
describe the ladies piecemeal, the landscapes 
leaf by leaf. Possibly, as has been sug- 
gested, the habitual sight of pictures ena- 
bles the Italian to succeed where the Ger- 
man fails; to harmonize the colors on the 
canvas and build up the fragments into a 
proportioned statue, and thus obtain a single 
mental impression. Whether this be so or 
not, the pictorial quality is a tribute exacted 



118 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

from literature by the ruling art, and illus- 
trates the Italian proclivity to identify the 
mind's eye with the body's, to turn the things 
of the intellect into objects of sense. This 
realism, too, is shown as continuously in the 
frequent lapsing of Pulci's story, for exam- 
ple, into undisguised burlesque, low comedy, 
and broad f nn ; and more subtly in the pre- 
vailing irony of Ariosto. The poems thus 
constructed were an acceptable, usually a 
high, mode of amusement; they interested 
the fancy, delighted the senses, and stirred 
laughter. The Italians of the Renaissance 
asked no more. 

In the prose tales, of which so many were 
written after the model of Boccaccio, the 
absorption of interest in simple incident is 
more plain, and the presence of contempo- 
rary manners more manifest. Various as 
they are, including every rank of life in 
their characters, and every phase of action 
in their events, they all bear a family resem- 
blance. They are for the most part com- 
edies of intrigue, arresting attention by 
romantic or piquant situations ; usually im- 
moral, not infrequently obscene. The crafty 
seducer is the text, the fool of a husband 
the comment ; and when the gloss is read, 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 119 

afforded by the lives of the cardinals and 
the wit of the cajntoli, no ground remains 
for doubting that they hold the mirror up 
to society as it then was. If they have any 
other than a humorous or romantic interest, 
it is the interest of the tragedy of physical 
horror, as in our English Titus Andronicus. 
Of course there are many stories to which 
this broad and rapid generalization would 
not apply, — tales wholly innocent, or harm- 
less at least, full of movement, fancy, and 
action, graceful and charming with the art 
of story-telling at its Italian best; but, as 
a whole, they must be described as exhibiting 
a masque of sin. They are of the town in 
taste and temper; the corruption they set 
forth is not of the court or the curia only, 
but of the citizens ; the laugh with which 
they conclude is an echo from the lips of the 
trades-people. Their principal value now is 
historic ; they are the clear record of that 
social decay which condemned Italy to cen- 
turies of degradation. To ask why they did 
not generate the novel or suggest the drama 
is to state a literary puzzle ; but the hun- 
dred considerations which have been put 
forth to explain the abortive issue of the 
miracle plays apply here also. It would 



120 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

seem as if the laws of spiritual development 
were miperceived ; as if the knowledge of 
right and wrong as indestructible agencies 
to build or shatter character did not exist ; 
as if the spirit had stiffened into that sense- 
less stupor in which evil is no longer recog- 
nized for itself. It was left for the drama- 
tists of the Globe Theatre to take these 
external incidents and show the meaning 
they had for humanity ; to transfer the in- 
terest from the momentary and outer act, 
and centre it upon the living soul within. 
The Italians could not work the mines they 
owned ; the pure gold of poetry that the 
novels held in amalgamation was to be the 
treasure of England. The works of the last 
years do not differ from the original of Boc- 
caccio except for the worse ; his successors 
never equaled their master ; nor have their 
works obtained currency, like his, among 
men, as a part of the general literature of 
the cultivated world. 

As the novelists make more prominent 
the realistic element of the narrative poems, 
the idyllic writers develop more plainly the 
pure poetic quality ; in reading them one 
willingly assents to the enthusiasm which 
names their works the literature of the 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 121 

golden age. More than the epic or the 
novel, the idyl influenced the future. Ar- 
cadia is a well-known region in every great 
literature of Europe, and its atmosphere 
still hangs over the opera. The creator of 
this pastoral myth was the father of much 
beauty. Something was borrowed from the 
Garden of Eden, from the Virgilian fields, 
and from the Earthly Paradise; the reli- 
gious, classical, and mediaeval moods united 
in it ; but essentially it was pure Italian, — 
Arcadia was an idealized Italy. The scene 
presented was the same country life that 
forms the background of all contemporary 
literature, but charmed, ennobled, and bathed 
in a softer than Italian air. There was lit- 
tle left in that age of ruin but delight in 
the natural beauty that was darkened by no 
shadow of humanity. The villa, the culti- 
vated fields, the still, calm morning sky, 
were probably never more dear to the Ital- 
ian heart than then, and it was this unso- 
phisticated and keenly felt delight in nature 
that flowered in the idyl. To Northern na- 
tions Arcadia must always be a dream ; to 
the Italians, then, at least, it was only the 
refinement of what was most real to them. 
It was because the idyl was so deeply rooted 



122 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 

in a genuine emotion that it outlived the 
other modes of literature contemporary with 
it, and developed its final perfection only in 
the next age of the counter reformation in 
the art of Tasso and Guarini. But even in 
its earlier history the idyl shares with the 
best narrative poems that beauty of form 
which has conferred on both an immortal- 
ity denied to the novel. The poets were all 
literary artists: they polished their verses 
with assiduous care ; they expended many 
years in correction, elaboration, and adjust- 
ment ; and they obtained that exquisite fin- 
ish which, surface-like as it may seem, is ada- 
mant to the tooth of time. They achieved 
beauty, and won the delight that comes 
from its creation and contemplation ; humor, 
too, they made their own, and gave it uni- 
versal interest; they illustrated in practice 
the theory of art for art's sake ; yet, after 
all, what is the judgment of posterity, we 
will not say on the men who were never sus- 
pected of being heroes, but on their works ? 
They have left a literature, not of intellec- 
tual or moral weight, but of recreation ; one 
that does not reveal, but amuses, — does not 
enlighten, inform, or guide life, but solaces 
and helps to while it away. This literature 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 123 

enriched the Northern minds by making 
them more sensitive to beauty, and by sharp- 
ening their perception of artistic refine- 
ments ; it has left no other mark on civiliza- 
tion. The interest which the golden age 
excites in cultivated minds seldom loses its 
dilettante character; the really serious in- 
terest is in the Italy of Dante and Giotto, 
or in the genius of isolated men who stand 
apart, like Michel Angelo. 

The Renaissance was a movement of civ- 
ilization not less important than the Refor- 
mation or the Revolution, and to Italy, as 
its source, the debt of the world is great. 
But the Renaissance was not conveyed to 
Europe by the literature of its corruption ; 
it was conveyed in far different ways. 



KEMAKKS ON SHELLEY. 

I. HIS CAREER. 

The natural charm by which Shelley fas- 
cinated his familiar friends lives after him, 
and has gathered about him for his defense 
a group of men whose affection for him 
seems no whit lessened because they never 
knew him face to face. The one common 
characteristic prominent in all who have 
written of him with sympathy, however mea- 
gre or valuable their individual contributions 
of praise, criticism, or information, is this 
sentiment of direct, intimate, intense per- 
sonal loyalty which he has inspired in them 
to a degree rare, if not unparalleled, in lit- 
erary annals. Under the impulse of this 
strong love, they have championed his cause, 
until his fame, overshadowed in his own 
generation by the vigorous worldliness of 
Byron, and slightly esteemed by nearly all 
of his craft, has grown world-wide. With 
the enthusiasts, however, who have aided in 
bringing about this result, admiration for 



REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 125 

Shelley's work is a secondary thing ; its vir- 
tue is blended with and transfused into the 
nature of Shelley himself, who is the centre 
of their worship. To reveal the fineness 
and lustre of his character, his essential 
worth throughout that romantic and dark- 
ened career of thirty years, is their chief 
pleasure, and in this, too, they have now won 
some success, and have partially reversed 
the popular estimate of the poet as merely 
an immoral atheist ; yet, although some 
amends have been made for harsh contem- 
porary criticism, Shelley's name is still for 
orthodoxy a shibboleth of pious terror and 
of insult to God. It is still too early to de- 
cide whether the modification of the harsh 
criticism once almost universally bestowed 
upon Shelley will go on permanently, or 
whether it is not in some measure due to 
peculiar results of culture in our own time. 
Without attempting to prejudge this ques- 
tion, especially in regard to poetic fame, 
there seems to be, as the cause passes out of 
the hands of those who knew Shelley per- 
sonally into the guardianship of the new 
generation, a tendency toward greater unity 
of judgment in regard to the larger phases 
of his character and conduct. 



126 REMABES ON SHELLEY. 

Shelley, as Swinburne said of William 
Blake, was born into the church of rebels ; 
he was born, also, gentle, loving, and fear- 
less. The dangers to which such a natu- 
ral endowment would inevitably expose him 
were aggravated by a misguided education, 
and by the temper of that feverish and ill- 
regulated age in which modern reform be- 
gan. He was in early years first of all a 
revolter; he would do only what seemed to 
him best, and in the way which seemed to 
him best ; he took nothing upon authority, 
he acknowledged no validity in the customs 
and beliefs which past experience had be- 
queathed to men ; he must examine every 
conclusion anew, and accept or reject it by 
the light of his own limited thought and ob- 
servation ; he carried the Protestant spirit 
to its ultimate extreme — all legal and in- 
tellectual results embodied in institutions or 
in accepted beliefs must show cause to him 
why they should exist. He was, moreover, 
in haste ; he could not rest in a doubt, he 
could not suspend his judgment, he could 
not wait for fuller knowledge. Finding 
only incomplete or incompetent answers to 
his questioning, he leaped to the conclusion 
that there was no answer. Had he been 



REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 127 

contented with allowing this spirit to influ- 
ence only his own private creed and conduct, 
mischief enough was sure to be wrought for 
him, error and suffering were in store for 
him in no common degree. But he was not 
merely building an ideal of life and formu- 
lating a rule of living for himself ; he had, 
as he afterward confessed, a passion for re- 
forming the world. He was early in print, 
and aspired to teach the world before he 
was well out of his teens, — took in his 
hands, indeed, the regeneration of Ireland 
through pamphlets, and public eloquence, 
and personal agitation and supervision. It 
is easy to dismiss this as the foolish conceit 
of a boy of talent much given to dreaming. 
It is easy, too, to dismiss his exile from his 
home and his expulsion from Oxford as 
childish obstinacy, disobedience, ingratitude, 
and presumption ; but if there was anything 
of these faults in him there was also much 
more made evident in these first trials of his 
character : there was the capacity for sacri- 
fice, the resolution to be faithful to the truth 
as he saw it. The beginning of manhood 
found him in the full sway of immature 
conviction, and already suffering the penalty. 
It is not necessary to follow out in detail 



128 EEMAEKS ON SHELLEY. 

the development of a life so entered upon. 
It led him to attack Christianity and to dis- 
regard the law of marriage, and this is the 
sum and substance of his offense. Yet no 
sign, perhaps, is so indicative of the in- 
creased liberality of religion in our time as 
the attempt which has been made to show 
that Shelley was essentially Christian, an 
attempt so common and vigorous that Tre- 
lawney felt called upon to protest against 
it. In this spirit Mr. Symonds writes from 
one extreme : " It is certain that as Chris- 
tianity passes beyond its mediaeval phase, 
and casts aside the husk of outworn dogmas, 
it will more and more approximate to Shel- 
ley's exposition. Here, and here only, is a 
vital faith adapted to the conditions of mod- 
ern thought, indestructible because essential, 
and fitted to unite instead of separating 
minds of divers quality " ; and Rev. F. W. 
Robertson, from the other extreme, writes : 
"I cannot help feeling that there was a 
spirit in poor Shelley's mind which might 
have assimilated with the spirit of his Re- 
deemer, — nay, which I will dare to say was 
kindred with that spirit, if only his Re- 
deemer had been differently imaged to him. 
... I will not say that a man who by his 



BEMABES ON SHELLEY. 129 

opposition to God means opposition to a de- 
mon, to whom the name of God in his mind 
is appended, is an enemy of God ; . . . 
change the name and I will bid that char- 
acter defiance with you ! " A candid exami- 
nation must show, however, that Trelawney 
is right ; there is no doubt that Shelley re- 
jected altogether what is properly known as 
Christianity, in youth violently and with ha- 
tred, while in later years he came to care 
less about it. At the same time it is to be 
remembered that he had seen Christianity 
only in those forms whose most prominent 
characteristic is defect in charity and love, 
which Shelley believed to be the central 
virtues. Probably he never dissociated the 
Christian God from the Jewish Jehovah, 
and his feeling towards him is well illus- 
trated in the terrible indictment he makes 
against him in reference to Milton's delinea- 
tion of Satan as one fct who, in the cold secu- 
rity of undoubted triumph, inflicts upon his 
fallen enemy the most horrible punishment, 
not from any mistaken hope of thereby re- 
forming him, but with the avowed purpose 
of exasperating him to deserve new tor- 
ments." It is, therefore, impossible to deiry 
Shelley's atheism ; the most that can be con- 



130 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 

tended for is that in natural piety, in purity 
of life and motive, in conscientious and un- 
selfish action, Shelley was exceptionally con- 
spicuous. 

It is here that the second charge against 
Shelley has its place. How, it is indignantly 
asked, was he unselfish, loving, and con- 
scientious, when he left his youthful wife to 
circumstances which resulted in her suicide, 
and transferred his devotion to another? 
Nothing more can be done than to point out 
the fact that Shelley acted in harmony with 
his convictions of social duty ; that the first 
marriage was the result of knight-errantry 
rather than affection, and had become des- 
titute of any pleasure ; that Shelley did not 
desert his wife in such a way as to make 
her suicide chargeable to him. These con- 
siderations do not, it is true, relieve him of 
condemnation, or remove the really great de- 
fect in his moral perception of the responsi- 
bility which rested upon him in consequence 
of a thoughtless and foolish marriage. Yet 
it is not doubtful that in his life he atoned 
for his error, if suffering is atonement ; from 
that time a shadow fell upon him which 
never was removed. It is hard to find heart 
for reproach when one, whose whole gospel 






EEMABES ON SHELLEY. 1S1 

was love, is so cruelly entangled in the un- 
foreseen consequences of his acts that he 
seems to have wrought the work of hatred. 

What, then, under this presentation of 
the case, remains to be said for that ideal 
character which those who love Shelley be- 
lieve to have been his possession? That, 
beginning life with a theory which left every 
desire and impulse free course, which im- 
posed no restrictions except those of his 
own honor and self-respect, which acknow- 
ledged no command not proceeding from his 
own reason, he yet served the truth he saw 
with entire loyalty and sincerity of heart ; 
that, making many errors throughout a dark- 
ened life, he did not strive by lightness of 
heart or logical sophistication to avoid their 
penalties of misery and remorse, but kept 
them in memory and bore his burden of sor- 
row courageously ; that by intense thought 
and bitter experience he came at last to 
find the laws of life and to obey them. He 
found how impossible it is for the individ- 
ual to solve the problems put before him, so 
that he himself grew content to leave many 
of these in doubt ; found how ignorant it 
was in him to make his own experience the 
measure of the conditions of general human 



132 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 

life, and attempt to reform the world's mo- 
tives and standards by reference to that 
experience alone ; found how little the indi- 
vidual counts for in life, so that the youth, 
who with fervid hope took up the regenera- 
tion of a whole nation in confidence, came to 
doubt whether it was worth while for him 
to write at all, and rated himself far below 
his friend Byron. These characteristics are 
the evidence of his strength, sincerity, and 
Tightness of purpose ; and through these he 
worked out an ideal of life and rule of liv- 
ing, which differed much from those of his 
early days. No ideal intrinsically more 
powerful in influence or more exalted in vir- 
tue has been worked out by men who, like 
himself, found the old familiar standards 
rationally inadequate and morally weak. 
These are the essential elements in Shelley's 
career, and to them his personal qualities 
and his daily life give form and color. This, 
too, is the work of a man framed for self- 
destruction, against whom circumstances did 
their worst throughout. The marvel is, not 
that his life was so broken in private happi- 
ness, and his public work so unequal in the 
worth of its results, but, taking all into ac- 
count, that he saved so much of his life and 



BEMAEKS ON SBELLEY. 133 

work through his perception of the valuable 
objects of living, and his clinging to them. 

This, too, was the result of the imperfect 
years of preparation. He had given him 
only the traditional thirty years which be- 
long to every genius for trial and training 
before the finished work can be required. 
He had just recognized the conditions to 
which he must conform, and was only ready 
to begin when he died. 

II. HIS ACQUAINTANCES. 

It is impossible to condense Shelley's Life 
in a clear way. One turns the pages, and 
owns for the thousandth time the fascination 
of Shelley, from the first glimpse of the boy, 
pressing his face against the window-pane to 
kiss his sister, to the hot July afternoon 
when he made his last embarkation, and the 
summer storm swept the gleaming mountains 
from his sight; but no art transmits the 
spell, and the story, clasped between these 
periods, must be left in its integrity. Shel- 
ley lived in solitude, and died before he was 
thirty years old ; but his career involved such 
variety of scenes, persons, and incidents, was 
so thick -strewn with interesting episodes, 
and contained so many perplexed passages, 



134 BEMAEKS ON SHELLEY. 

that it is a study by itself, and requires 
for its mastery an acquaintance with an ex- 
tensive literature of its own. It were useless 
to attempt a criticism, or to describe Shelley 
anew, but some unstudied remarks upon his 
fortunes in life may be ventured upon. 

Must one incur the charge of being super- 
cilious and aristocratic if he acknowledges 
at once a feeling, after reading Shelley's life, 
of having been in very disagreeable com- 
pany ? Assuredly no one can rise from the 
perusal with a heightened respect for human 
nature, apart from Shelley. He was born a 
gentleman ; his innate courtesy clothes him 
with attractiveness, and distinguishes him 
among his associates as a person of a differ- 
ent kind from them, in his actions and bear- 
ing ; and the deference which Byron showed 
to him, it is not unlikely, sprang from a 
perception of this strain of breeding in him 
rather than from appreciation of his genius 
or his nature. In his earliest fellowship with 
school - friends, for whom he had a kindly 
regard at Eton and after they went down 
together to Oxford, though Hogg plainly ob- 
scures it, there is a gleam here and there of 
natural and equal companionship ; but this 
morning ray soon dies out. He was, after- 






REMARKS ON SBELLEY. 135 

wards, almost uniformly unfortunate in his 
acquaintances. His life was truly one long 
and sorrowful disillusion ; and in it not the 
least part was the discovery of how he had 
been deceived in his judgment of persons. 

Hogg was his first example. Shelley be- 
came familiar with him at Oxford, and, not 
content with having him for a bosom friend, 
wished to make him his brother-in-law. At 
that time Shelley was in the first crude fer- 
ment of his intellectual life, eagerly absorb- 
ing the new knowledge which came to him 
from his indiscriminate reading, and disput- 
ing on all the usual topics with vehement 
and unwearied earnestness, insatiable curi- 
osity, and the delight of a youth who has 
just made the discovery that he has a mind 
of his own. His thoughts and letters were 
mostly polemical; ideal elements of moral- 
ity were growing up in him, and radical 
views of conduct getting a hold in his 
convictions. He was willful,, precipitate, 
and heedless through inexperience ; he was 
thrown the more upon himself, and given a 
violent turn toward rebellion, to which he 
was prone enough, by his expulsion from 
Oxford, and the senseless attempt of his 
family to make him suppress his mental and 



136 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 

moral life by denying his first dear conclu- 
sions. In this state, partly from adventure 
and restlessness, perhaps, but also from a 
sense of obligation, the desire to spread his 
gospel, and by the mere favor of circum- 
stances, he married his first wife, though he 
knew that his sympathies were more engaged 
than his heart. 

At Edinburgh, whither the pair had gone, 
Hogg joined them, and with him they re- 
turned to York, where Shelley left his wife 
in his friend's care during a brief necessary 
absence. Hogg, who appears to have been 
not so pure as might be wished in his uni- 
versity days, tried to seduce her ; and when 
Shelley came back he learned the facts. He 
loved Hogg ; he was ashamed, he wrote, to 
tell him how much he loved him ; he was 
grateful to him for having stood by him and 
shared his expulsion from the college ; and 
he placed the most extravagant estimate 
upon his abilities. What followed upon the 
disclosure Shelley himself tells in a letter 
written at the time : — 

" We walked to the fields beyond York. 
I desired to know fully the account of this 
affair. I heard it from him, and I believe he 
was sincere. All I can recollect of that ter- 



MEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 137 

rible day was that I pardoned him, — fully, 
freely pardoned him ; that I would still be 
a friend to him, and hoped soon to convince 
him how lovely virtue was ; that his crime, 
not himself, was the object of my detesta- 
tion ; that I value a human being not for 
what it has been, but for what it is ; that I 
hoped the time would come when he would 
regard his horrible error with as much dis- 
gust as I did. He said little ; he was pale, 
terror-struck, remorseful. " 

One may smile at this episode, if he be 
cynical, and has left youth far enough be- 
hind; but for all that, there is something 
pathetic in these sentences of boyish good- 
ness, this simple belief in the moral princi- 
ples which Shelley had found in his first 
search, and to which he had given the alle- 
giance of his unworn heart; and in this 
scene of forgiveness, still confused with the 
emotions of first friendship betrayed, one 
perceives the Shelley we know, though he 
was not yet out of his teens. Some time 
elapsed before Shelley realized all the inci- 
dent meant ; then he wrote, " I leave him to 
his fate ; " and when they met again in Lon- 
don, the old footing was gone forever. 

Godwin, too, affords a capital example of 



138 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 

a shattered ideal. He was the Socrates of the 
young poet, and Shelley, who derived the 
main articles of his political and social creed 
from the radical philosopher's great book, 
was already adoring him as one in the pan- 
theon of the immortal dead, when he learned 
from Southey that his master and emanci- 
pator still walked the earth. He sat down 
at once and Wrote a characteristic epistle, in 
which he expressed himself with the enthu- 
siasm of a disciple not yet twenty, and re- 
spectfully but earnestly besought the living 
friendship and advice of him whom he re- 
garded as the light of the new age. God- 
win was interested, and long and frequent 
letters, admirable in tone upon both sides, 
passed between them. The elder endeav- 
ored to check the irrepressible activity and 
eager plans of the young reformer, who had 
no notion of waiting until he should grow 
old before setting to work to remake society ; 
and the youth, on his part, exhibited a defer- 
ence and willingness to be guided such as 
he never showed before or afterwards. The 
first modification of Shelley's idea of God- 
win came in consequence of their personal 
acquaintance, as was natural ; but in dis- 
covering that Godwin was really an idiosyn- 



REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 139 

cratic mortal, as well as an illuminating in- 
tellect, Shelley did not yield his admiration 
for the sage. One can still see the un- 
bounded astonishment of the poet, which 
Mary Godwin describes, when she told him 
her father was annoyed by his addressing 
him as " Mr." instead of " Esq.," in direct- 
ing his letters. They got on very well to- 
gether, however, until Shelley ran away with 
Mary, — a practical exposition of Godwin's 
doctrines, which he, having now grown re- 
spectable and socially cautious, did not at 
all relish. Shelley had before this aided 
Godwin somewhat in financial embarrass- 
ments. That philosopher was always in 
debt ; and the young disciple, who, though 
the heir to a great property, had no way of 
realizing anything from it except by selling 
post-obit bonds, agreed with his master that 
philosophers have a paramount claim on any 
money their friends might own. He was 
willing to discharge his duty by getting 
Godwin out of debt, or assisting him as far 
as he could in the matter. When he re- 
turned to England with Mary he found that 
the philosopher would not see or forgive 
him, and positively declined to correspond 
except upon the subject of how much money 



140 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 

Shelley could give him. Shelley had no 
thought of not doing his own duty, because 
of the conduct of other people; and while 
he felt Godwin's hardness and inconsistency, 
nevertheless he would relieve that great mind 
from the little annoyances consequent on 
borrowing money without providing means 
of repayment. He, however, was not blind ; 
and what he learned of Godwin in the course 
of these transactions had a destroying influ- 
ence upon that ideal of the man which he 
had formed in his first days of revolutionary 
hope. In the second year of his life with 
Mary he told the philosopher what he 
thought of the whole matter in a letter which 
one may be excused for reading with pecu- 
liar satisfaction : — 

" It has perpetually appeared to me to 
have been your especial duty to see that, so 
far as mankind value your good opinion, we 
were dealt justly by, and that a young fam- 
ily, innocent and benevolent and united, 
should not be confounded with prostitutes 
and seducers. My astonishment, and, I will 
confess, when I have been treated with most 
harshness and cruelty by you, my indigna- 
tion, has been extreme, that, knowing as you 
do my nature, any considerations should 



REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 141 

have prevailed on you to have been thus 
harsh and cruel. I lamented also over my 
ruined hopes of all that your genius once 
taught me to expect from your virtue, when 
I found that for yourself, your family, and 
your creditors you would submit to that 
communication with me which you once re- 
jected and abhorred, and which no pity for 
my poverty or sufferings, assumed willingly 
for you, could avail to extort. Do not talk of 
forgiveness again to me, for my blood boils 
in my veins, and my gall rises against all 
that bears the human form, when I think of 
what 1, their benefactor and ardent lover, 
have endured of enmity and contempt from 
you and from all mankind." 

The writer was that youth of twenty-three 
years, of whom Godwin remarks that he 
knew " that Shelley's temper was occasion- 
ally fiery, resentful, and indignant." It is 
true that it was so, and one is pleased to 
find upon what fit occasions it broke out. 
Shelley, however, had undertaken a hopeless 
and endless task in trying to extricate God- 
win from debt, and he spent much money, 
raised at a great sacrifice, in the vain at- 
tempt. What he thought of these transac- 
tions, when his judgment had matured, we 



142 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 

know from another delightfully plain-spoken 
letter, written five years later, in answer to 
renewed importunities : — 

" I have given you the amount of a con- 
siderable fortune, and have destituted my- 
self, for the purpose of realizing it, of nearly 
four times the amount. Except for the 
good-will which this transaction seems to 
have produced between you and me, this 
money, for any advantage it ever conferred 
on you, might as well have been thrown into 
the sea. Had I kept in my own hands this 
.£4,000 or <£5,000, and administered it in 
trust for your permanent advantage, I should 
indeed have been your benefactor. The 
error, however, was greater in the man of 
mature age, extensive experience, and pene- 
trating intellect than in the crude and im- 
petuous boy. Such an error is seldom com- 
mitted twice." 

But long before this, Shelley, though his 
estimate of Godwin's powers, in common 
with that of the people of the time, remained 
extravagant, had found out the difference 
between the author of Political Justice and 
Plato and Bacon. 

If any one wonders at the extent to which 
Shelley let himself be fleeced by the philo- 



REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 143 

sophicai radical of Skinner Street, he should 
reserve some astonishment for the remainder 
of the shearers. Shelley, it is to be remem- 
bered, was never in possession of his prop- 
erty, and had only a small allowance at first, 
and a thousand pounds a year after he was 
twenty-four years old ; he was extravagant 
in his generosity, and gave money with a 
free hand, whenever he had any, to the poor 
about him, to his needy friends, and to 
causes of one kind and another which ex- 
cited in him his passion for philanthropy. 
He was, consequently, in his early days, 
commonly in debt for his own expenses, and 
often in danger of arrest and imprisonment. 
When he mentioned his days of poverty, in 
that letter to Godwin, it was not a mere 
phrase ; and though a settlement was at last 
made which provided for him sufficiently, 
he was never ahead in his savings. Under 
these circumstances, his biography at times 
reminds one of the old comedy, with its mob 
of parasites and legacy - hunters. He was 
simply victimized by those who could estab- 
lish any claim on his benevolence. No doubt 
he gave willingly, with all his heart, to Pea- 
cock and Leigh Hunt and the rest, as he did 
to Godwin, and thought it was his duty as 



144 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 

well as his pleasure ; but his generosity does 
not alter the fact that his acquaintances 
were very dull of conscience in money mat- 
ters. One begins to relent a little toward 
Hogg, remembering that he did actually 
share his own funds with Shelley just after 
the expulsion from Oxford, when the latter 
could get no money, owing to his father's 
displeasure ; and for Horace Smith, the 
banker, who sometimes advanced money to 
Shelley, and not too much, one has a feeling 
of amazed respect. 

The worst misfortune of Shelley, however, 
in the friends he made, was to have met and 
married Harriet Westbrook. The circum- 
stances of their nnion and its unlucky course 
and tragical close have lately been for the 
first time fully set forth. The marriage on 
Shelley's side was not originally one of love, 
but it became one of affection. For two 
years life went on without the discovery of 
anything to break the happiness of the pair ; 
but after the birth of their first child trouble 
arose, and rapidly culminated. It is most 
likely that the sister-in-law, Eliza, who lived 
with them, was the source of the original 
dissension by her interference, arbitrariness, 
and control of Harriet ; but, as Shelley had 






BEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 145 

grown in mind and character, the difference 
between him and his wife in endowment and 
in taste was bound to make itself felt, and 
to put an end to the unity of study and 
spirit of which he had dreamed ; and it is 
clear enough that she had tired of the stud- 
ies and the purposes in which Shelley's life 
consisted, and that though overborne for a 
time, by his influence, she was now showing 
herself worldly, frivolous, and weak. She 
had married the heir to a baronetcy and a 
fortune, and desired to profit by it. In one 
way and another she had become hard and 
unyielding toward Shelley, had made him 
thoroughly miserable, and, in the earlier 
months of 1814, was living away from him ; 
and he, on his side, as late as May in that 
year, as appears from stanzas now first 
printed, was trying to soften her. While 
affairs were in this condition he first met 
Mary Godwin, and he fell passionately in 
love with her, all the more because of the 
long strain of dejection and loneliness ; and 
in addition to the story of the dissensions 
that had arisen in his family, and the dif- 
ference of character and temperament which 
had declared itself between his wife and 
himself, Shelley is said to have told Mary 



146 BEMABES ON SHELLEY, 

that Harriet had been unfaithful to him. 
If he did not tell her then, he did after- 
wards. On what evidence he relied we do 
not know; nor is there any confirmatory 
proof from other quarters except a letter of 
Godwin's written after Harriet's suicide, in 
which he states the same fact as coming 
from unquestionable authority unconnected 
with Shelley. Not long before his death 
Shelley renewed the charge, though in a 
veiled and inferential way, in a letter to 
Southey, in which he defends himself for his 
conduct in this matter, declares his inno- 
cence of any harm done or intended, refuses 
to be held responsible for the suicide of Har- 
riet, and practically asserts that he had 
grounds for divorce, had he chosen to free 
himself in that way. There is no need to 
prove that Shelley was right in his belief of 
his wife's infidelity ; but if it be thought 
that Shelley did in trutli believe her guilty, 
that has much to do with our estimate of 
his action. He was twenty-two years old, 
or nearly that, and he held radical views 
as to the permanence and sacredness of the 
marriage bond, as also did Mary, who in- 
herited them from her mother. Their de- 
cision to unite their lives, under these cir- 



BEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 147 

cumstances, was a practical admission that 
Shelley's home was in fact broken up, and 
that he was free to offer, and Mary to accept, 
not legal union, but a common home, with 
the expectation and purpose of complete 
devotion one to the other, in a pure spirit 
and for the ordinary ends of marriage. 

Shelley did not proceed secretly. He sum- 
moned Harriet, who had not thought of such 
serious results of her action, to London, and 
told her what he was going to do. She did 
not consent to the separation, nor does she 
seem to have regarded it as final. Shelley 
had a settlement made for her by the law- 
yers, provided credit for her, and two weeks 
after the interview left England with Mary. 
He wrote to Harriet on the journe} 7 ", assured 
her of his affection and his care for her, and 
indulged a plan that she should live near 
them, which is, perhaps, the most surprising 
instance of Shelley's purity of mind, and of 
the unworldliness or unreality, as one chooses 
to call it, of his conception of how human 
life might be lived. On his return he saw 
her, and agreed to leave the children with 
her ; and when his allowance was fixed at a 
thousand pounds, he gave orders to honor 
her drafts for two hundred pounds annually. 



148 BEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 

She had an equal amount from her own 
family, which had been paid since the be- 
ginning of their married life. When Shel- 
ley left England the second time, she was 
thus provided for, one would think, suffi- 
ciently. On his return he lost sight of her, 
and was anxiously inquiring for her, when 
the news of her suicide reached him. She 
had put the children, of whom the eldest 
was three years old, out to board, at a time 
when he was ill ; she had not been permit- 
ted to see her father ; but the circumstances 
immediately surrounding her death are not 
known. Shelley, though he bore his share o£ 
natural sorrow for the death of one to whom 
he had been tenderly attached, did not hold 
himself guilty of any wrong. 

It is no wonder that in the last few years 
of his life Shelley would not talk of his 
earlier days, and had a kind of shame in re- 
membering in what ruin his hopes and pur- 
poses and the enthusiasm of his youth had 
fallen ; he felt it as an indignity to the 
nobleness of spirit which, in spite of all his 
failures, he knew had been his throughout. 
As we see those years, it is only for himself 
that we prize them ; and it is a pleasure to 
be enabled to look on them free from that 



BEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 149 

saddening retrospect of his own mind, and 
observe how natural and simple he really 
was. No one has ever had the days of his 
youth so laid open to the common gaze, and 
this is one charm of his personality, that we 
know him as a brother or a friend. The 
pages afford many happy anecdotes ; but 
one can linger here only to mark the con- 
stant playfulness of Shelley, which was a 
bright element in his earlier career and not 
altogether absent in his Italian life. The 
passion for floating paper - boats, which he 
indulged unweariedly, is well known ; but 
at all times he was ready for sport, and 
could even trifle with his dearest plans, as 
in the flotilla of bottles and aerial navy of 
fire-balloons, all loaded with revolutionary 
pamphlets, which he sent forth on the Dev- 
onshire coast. His running about the little 
garden, hand in hand with Harriet ; his im- 
personating fabulous monsters with Leigh 
Hunt's children, who begged him " not to do 
the horn ; " and his favorite sport with his 
little temporarily adopted Marlow girl, of 
placing her on the dining-table, and rush- 
ing with it across the long room, are in- 
stances that readily recur to mind, and 
illustrate the gayety and high spirits which 



150 BEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 

really belonged to him, and which perhaps 
the Serehio last knew when it bore him and 
his boat on his summer-day voyages. This 
side of his nature ought to be remembered, 
as well as that " occasionally fiery, resentful, 
and indignant " quality which Godwin ob- 
served, and the intense and restless practi- 
cality of the impatient reformer, when one 
thinks of Shelley (as he has been too often 
represented) as only a morbid, sensitive, 
idealizing poet, of a rather feminine spirit. 
That portrait of him is untruthful, for he 
was of a most masculine, active, and natu- 
rally joyful nature. 

After he left England for the last time, 
and took up his abode in Italy, principally, 
it would seem, because of the social re- 
proach and public stigma under which he 
lived, and by which he felt deeply wronged, 
he was not really much more fortunate in 
his company. The immediate reason for 
the journey was to take Byron's natural 
daughter, Allegra, to her father at Venice ; 
the mother, Miss Clairmont, went with them, 
and, as it turned out, continued to be a 
member of Shelley's family, as she had been 
since his union with Mary. It is now known 
that the Shelleys were ignorant of the lia- 



EEMARES ON SHELLEY. 151 

ison, both when it began in London, and 
afterward when they first met Byron at 
Geneva ; but Shelley had a warm affection 
for Miss Clairmont, whose friendlessness 
appealed to his sympathy, and he spent 
much time in Italy in trying to make Byron 
do his duty toward Allegra, and to soften 
the ill-nature of her parents toward each 
other. Byron's conduct in this matter was 
a powerful element in generating in Shelley 
that thorough contempt he expressed for the 
former as a man. But though Shelley's 
most winning qualities are to be observed, 
and his tact was conspicuously called forth 
by their negotiations in regard to the child, 
yet the connection with Miss Clairmont was 
unfortunate. That it repeatedly drew scan- 
dal upon him was a minor matter ; it was of 
more consequence that in his family she was 
a disturbing element, and Mary, who had 
disliked to have her as an inmate almost 
from the first, finally insisted on her with- 
drawal, but not until frequent disagreements 
had sadly marred the peace of Shelley's 
home. Mary, indeed, was not perfect, any 
more than other very young wives ; and by 
her jealousies, and yet more, it seems, by 
her attempts to make Shelley conform to the 



152 EEMABES ON SHELLEY. 

world, especially in the last year or two, she 
tried and harassed him; and so it came 
about that his love took the form of tender- 
ness for her welfare and feelings, and often 
of despondency for himself. Miss Clair- 
mont was a source of continual trouble for 
him in many ways : she was of an unhappy 
temperament and hard to live with ; but with 
his long-enduring and charitable disposition, 
and his extraordinary tenacity in attachment, 
and perfect readiness to admit the least ob- 
ligation upon him, proceeding from any one 
in trouble, he never wavered in his devotion 
to her interests and care for her happiness. 
It is a curious fact that Miss Clairmont, 
who lived to be very old, manipulated the 
written records of this portion of her life, 
so that her evidence is of very questionable 
worth, though better, one hopes, than that 
of her mother, the second Mrs. Godwin, 
whose lying about the Shelleys was of the 
most wholesale and conscienceless kind. 

As with Miss Clairmont, so in a less de- 
gree with others of the Italian circle. But 
enough has been said of the character of the 
people whom Shelley knew. It cannot be 
that they cut so poor a figure because of 
Shelley's presence, hard as the contrast of 






REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 153 

common human nature must be with him. 
It is observable, and it is in some sort a test, 
that he did not overvalue them. Hogg, Pea- 
cock, and Medwin were all deceived, if they 
thought he trusted them or held them closer 
than mere friendly acquaintances ; there is 
no evidence that he felt for Williams or 
Trelawney any more than an affectionate 
good will ; toward Leigh Hunt he had the 
kindest feeling of gratitude and of respect, 
and for Gisborne and Reveley a warm cor- 
diality, but nothing more. Mary he loved, 
though with full knowledge of her weak- 
nesses, in a manly way ; for Miss Clairmont 
he had a true affection ; and he recognized 
poetically a womanly attractiveness in Mrs. 
Williams, who seems to have represented to 
him the spirit of restfulness and peace, in 
the last months of his life. But at the end, 
his errors respecting men and things being 
swept away, his ideals removed into the 
eternal world, and his disillusion complete, 
the most abiding impression is of the loneli- 
ness in which he found himself ; and remem- 
bering this, one forgets the companions lie 
had upon his journey, and fastens attention 
more closely upon the man through whose 
genius that journey has become one of un- 
dying memory. 



154 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 

There is no thought of eulogizing him in 
saying that he represents the ideal of per- 
sonal and social aspiration, of the love of 
beauty and of virtue equally, and of the hope 
of eradicating misery from the world ; hence 
springs in large measure his hold on young 
hearts, on those who value the spirit above 
all else and do not confine their recognition 
of it within too narrow bounds, and on all 
who are believers in the reform of the world 
by human agencies. He represents this 
ideal of aspiration in its most impassioned 
form ; and in his life one reads the saddest 
history of disillusion. It is because, in the 
course of this, he abated no whit of his life- 
long hope, did not change his practice of 
virtue, and never yielded his perfect faith in 
the supreme power of love, both in human 
life and in the universe, that his name has 
become above all price to those over whom 
his influence extends. It is, perhaps, more 
as a man than as a poet merely that he is 
beloved ; the shadows upon his reputation, 
as one approaches nearer, are burnt away in 
light ; and he is the more honored, the more 
he is known. For it would be wrong; to 
close even these informal remarks without 
expressing dissent from the assumption that 



REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 155 

Shelley's intellectual and moral life was one 
long mistake. Disillusion it was, and the 
nature of it has been indicated by the single 
point of his acquaintances ; but a life of dis- 
illusion and one of mere mistake are not 
to be confounded together. Better fortune 
cannot be asked for a youth than that he 
should conceive life nobly, and, in finding 
wherein it falls short, should yet not fall 
short himself of his ideal beyond what may 
be forgiven to human frailty. Shelley's 
misconceptions were the conditions of his 
living the ideal life at all, and differed from 
those of other youths in face of an untried 
world only by their moral elevation, passion, 
and essential nobleness ; he matured as other 
men do by time and growth and experience, 
and he suffered much by the peculiar cir- 
cumstances of his fate ; but in the issue the 
substance of error in his life was less than 
it seems. Shelley, at least, never admitted 
he had been wrong in the essential doctrines 
of his creed and the motives of his acts, 
though he had been deceived in regard to 
human nature and what was possible to it 
in society. 



156 BEMABES ON SHELLEY. 

III. HIS ITALIAN LETTERS. 

The prose work of Shelley has remained 
in the obscurity which it once shared with 
his poetry. The formal essays, which con- 
cern the transitory affairs of the world or 
themes of thought remote through their 
generality, are valued, even by admirers 
of Shelley, mainly as media of his spirit ; 
the familiar letters, scattered in old books, 
or collected only in a costly edition, and de-^ 
prived of literary effectiveness because those 
of high and enduring interest have never 
been selected and massed until recently, have 
escaped any wide public attention ; even the 
translations have been neglected. All this 
really large body of prose, however exalted 
by its informing enthusiasm, however exqui- 
site in language, and melodious, lies outside 
the open pathways of literature. It is this 
fact which gave the element of surprise to 
what Mr. Arnold called his doubt " whether 
Shelley's delightful Essays and Letters, 
which deserve to be far more read than they 
are now, will not resist the wear and tear of 
time better, and finally come to stand higher, 
than his poetry," — a judgment which well 
deserved Dr. Garnett's quiet rejoinder that 



BEMABES ON SHELLEY. 157 

" this deliverance will be weighed by those 
to whose lot it may fall to determine Mr. 
Arnold's own place as a critic." Dr. Gar- 
nett adds that, in an age when all letters 
approximate to the ideal set by men of busi- 
ness, Shelley's alone, among those of his 
time, rank with Gray's, Pope's, Cowper's, or 
Walpole's in possessing a certain classical 
impress similar to that of deliberate artistic 
work ; and, secondly, that they exhibit the 
mind of the poet as clearly as Marlborough's 
do the mind of the general, or Macaulay's 
the mind of the man of letters. Their two 
prime qualities are beauty of form and trans- 
parency. 

The sense of form has usually been denied 
to Shelley, and if by it is meant the purely 
critical impulse to remodel, revise, and polish 
for the sake of that finish which the schools 
prize, Shelley neither possessed it nor sought 
for it with any strong desire, but rather re- 
jected it as dangerously submitting the mind 
to system, against which he was prejudiced. 
But if by the sense of form is meant the in- 
stinct for proportion, for regulated combi- 
nation, for natural development of sensation 
into idea, idea into passion, so that the poem 
issues in a single harmony in the mind and 



158 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 

heart ; if, in other words, by that loose 
phrase is meant, not the corrective power of 
the critical, but the shaping power of the 
creative faculty working out ideal beauty 
directly, then both in his brief and in much 
of his longer poems Shelley was singularly 
distinguished by it. This spontaneous beauty 
of form, if we may so phrase it, is the only 
species that is found in these letters : fitness 
of words, sweetness of cadence, modulation 
of feeling in immediate response to thought 
and image, all conspiring to make up per- 
fection of utterance, are continually present, 
but not through erasure and elaboration. 
Shelley's self-training in literature, almost 
unrivaled as an apprenticeship in its length 
and continuity, more comprehensive, pro- 
found, and ardent than Pope's, more vital 
than Milton's, had made such literary lucid- 
ity and grace the habit of his pen, and he 
was fortunate in employing his gift upon 
subjects intrinsically most interesting to cul- 
tivated men : upon the art and landscape of 
Italy, or his own always high human rela- 
tions, or his poetic moods. 

In what he says of statues and paintings 
he shows but slight knowledge of art. The 
keenness of his perceptions and the warmth 



REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 159 

of his feelings made him particularly open 
to sensuous effects, so that in general he 
worships the later schools. In painting, 
especially, he can hardly be considered a safe 
guide for others, because his praise or cen- 
sure is largely dependent on his tempera- 
ment for its justification : a picture which is 
consonant with his own imagination, and 
stirs it, is thereby raised and glorified, but 
one whose theme would have been differ- 
ently developed by himself is at once made 
pale by contrast with the quick visions of 
his own vividly pictorial mind. Here is a 
portion of his description of a Christ Beati- 
fied:— 

"The countenance is heavy, as it were, 
with the rapture of the spirit; the lips 
parted, but scarcely parted, with the breath 
of intense but regulated passion ; the eyes 
are calm and benignant ; the whole features 
harmonized in majesty and sweetness." 

One cannot but feel that the face which 
Shelley thus summons up before us bears 
the same relation to the original as what the 
dull-minded call his plagiarisms from Lodge 
do to that poet's lyrics. Shelley often paints 
the picture over upon the outlines of the old 
canvas; but this transforming or penetrat- 



160 BEMABES O-V SHELLEY. 

ing power, as it will be differently named 
just as one believes the given picture to lack 
or possess what Shelley saw in it, lends such 
passages not only surpassing beauty, but a 
real value as interpretations of art. Much 
as Ruskin would differ from Shelley's judg- 
ments, the two are essentially similar in their 
mode of treatment, and in their faculty of 
giving the equivalent of form and color in 
eloquence. 

The description of landscape, which is an- 
other principal topic, possesses even more 
plainly classic beauty. Whether Shelley 
writes of nature in her wild and picturesque 
scenes, or where the presence of man has 
added pathos or dignity to her loveliness; 
whether he flashes the view upon us in one 
perfect line, or unfolds it slowly in uncon- 
fused detail, he displays the highest power 
in this field of literature. This view from 
the Forum of Pompeii, which, instead of be- 
ing robed with "the gray veil of his own 
words," seems filled with " the purple noon's 
transparent light," cannot be surpassed as 
speech at once familiar and noble : — 

" At the upper end, supported on an ele- 
vated platform, stands the temple of Jupi- 
ter. Under the colonnade of its portico we 



BEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 161 

sate, and pulled out our oranges, and figs, and 
bread, and medlars, — sorry fare, you will 
say, — and rested to eat. Here was a mag- 
nificent spectacle. Above and between the 
multitudinous shafts of the sun-shining col- 
umns was seen the sea, reflecting the purple 
noon of heaven above it, and supporting, as 
it were, on its line the dark, lofty mountains 
of Sorrento, of a blue inexpressibly deep, 
and tinged toward their summits with 
streaks of new-fallen snow. Between was 
one small green island. To the right was 
Caprese, Inarime, Prochyta, and Misenum. 
Behind was the single summit of Vesuvius, 
rolling forth volumes of thick white smoke, 
whose foam-like column was sometimes darted 
into the clear dark sky, and fell in little 
streaks along the wind. Between Vesuvius 
and the nearer mountains, as through a 
chasm, was seen the main line of the lof- 
tiest Apennines to the east. The day was 
radiant and warm. Every now and then 
we heard subterranean thunder of Vesuvius ; 
its distant, deep peals seemed to shake the 
very air and light of day, which interpene- 
trated our frames with the sullen and tre- 
mendous sound." 

Thus he wrote when merely passive to 



162 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 

nature's influences ; but when he begins to 
think he irradiates the scene ; he lifts it 
with his aspiration and softens it with his 
regret; he brings it near by reminiscences 
t)f the English fields and cliffs and streams ; 
he informs it with the large interests of the 
intellectual life ; and not infrequently he 
concludes with a passage which, in the ar- 
rangement of its images, the sequence of its 
thought and feeling, the unity of its effect, 
in all except metrical structure, is a poem. 
Many paragraphs might be cited which 
show the character of his genius as directly 
as do his verses, and which justify the claim 
advanced for them as having the permanent 
interest of ideal beauty. 

The principal charm of these letters, how- 
ever, as Dr. Garnett says, is not artistic, 
but moral. It is not meant to refer by this 
term to the practical morality of Shelley's 
deeds, or to his conscientiousness, humanity, 
self-sacrifice, or other such qualities as they 
are here displayed; of these there is no 
longer need to speak. Nor is it meant sim- 
ply to express the gratification one feels at 
finding that Shelley, unlike many men of 
letters who disappoint us by being only 
common mortals in private life, never falls 



REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 163 

below our conception of him, indicative as it 
is of his purity that his " unpremeditated 
song " does not fail to reach the height of 
his great argument. What impresses one 
most is rather the character of the life it- 
self, of the mind to which "trust in all 
things high came natural," that moved with 
equal ease among the things of beauty, on 
the heights of thought, or amid the common 
and trivial cares of household life and in 
the offices of friendship, and knew no dif- 
ference in the level of his life, so single was 
his nature and so completely expressed in 
all he did. In the most ideal passages, in 
those most impersonal, one does not lose the 
sense of friendliness in them, of the sweet 
human relationship which underlies the tell- 
ing of what he has to say, and keeps the 
letters in their appropriate sphere. They 
are not rhapsodies, or soliloquies, or dis- 
quisitions ; in other words, the visitations of 
the spirit that came to Shelley, and left 
record of themselves in this beauty and elo- 
quence and imaginative passion, did not iso- 
late him even momentarily, and could not 
sever him from his friends. Who these 
were, we know well enough : Miss Hitche- 
ner, the blue-stocking ; Hogg, the betrayer ; 



164 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 

the Williamses and Gisbornes, who seem to 
have belonged to the class of people known 
as satisfying ; Peacock, who, with all his 
nympholepsy, was a born beef -eater ; Smith, 
the obliging ; Hunt, the " wren," and Byron, 
the " eagle," in Shelley's nomenclature, — 
the too fortunate people who knew Shelley 
and whom he loved. They formed the en- 
vironment, which needs to be kept in mind 
by any who would estimate Shelley's moral 
power ; amid them he lived his high life and 
made it theirs, in the case of the most, dur- 
ing their communion with him. In a vague 
analogical way he sometimes brings to mind 
the Greek gods, who, with all their divine 
attributes of beauty, power, dignity, were 
singular among deities for their companion- 
ableness ; Shelley had that divine quality of 
being familiar and retaining his original 
brightness. Toward Byron alone does he 
show any repulsion ; he recognized Byron's 
admirable qualities, but he was alienated 
by the latter's selfishness, worldliness, and 
earthliness, even while he kept terms of 
amity. Shelley's sentence on Byron is most 
serious evidence against him, and it is now 
supported by much that Shelley could not 



REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 165 

have known; but it need not be discussed 
here. 

It is especially fortunate that the letters 
exhibit him after his boyhood, with its false 
starts, its follies and prejudices, its narrow- 
ness and confusion, was passed ; of that time 
we get only a noble echo in his sad remem- 
brance, amid his seeming failure, of the lofty 
purpose with which he had entered life, 
while we see the depth unconfused by the 
tumult of his soul. In these last years, it is 
true, the thwarting of his practical instinct 
was ending in hopelessness ; but if the 
earthly paradise that was the faith of his 
youth was now fading away, he was lifting 
his eyes to the city in the heavens, and had 
acknowledged the vanity of seeking the ideal 
he knew, except in the eternal ; he had 
worked out his salvation. Perhaps after all 
we do wrong to lament his death ; with that 
tragedy, in which every thought of Shelley 
involuntarily concludes, his work as a quick- 
ener of the spirit was accomplished. More 
finished works of art he might have given to 
us ; he could not have left a nobler or more 
enkindling memory. These letters help in 
the still necessary labor of clearing away 



166 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 

the misconceptions concerning him. In 
them one sees him only in the quiet of his 
soul, and will come to a better knowledge 
and perhaps a higher truth concerning him 
than is possible by reading his changeful 
poems alone. 



SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS OF 
OTHELLO, IAGO, AND SHY- 
LOCK. 

An actor of genius, at the moment of im- 
personating (either in imagination or in 
fact) a character of Shakespeare's, is prob- 
ably nearer to the dramatist's creative mood 
than any one else can get, except possibly 
the poet born. He may, to use a phrase of 
Booth's, in speaking of this mode of coming 
to an understanding of Shakespeare, " hit 
it " by the mere force within that bears him 
naturally on. Or, to take the case in which 
his sympathy with the role is imperfect, he 
may perceive wherein he is defective more 
clearly by his conscious failure than by any 
analysis. Again, the difficulties that arise 
from not knowing how Shakespeare put the 
play on the stage may not be solved rightly, 
it is true, by the moderns ; but the conclu- 
sions of the acting fraternity on these mat- 
ters are much more worthy of weight than 
those of men unacquainted with the prac- 



168 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 

tical working of that " business " which is 
a sort of cement for the scenes. Support 
could be found from many quarters for what 
Dr. Furness says in behalf of actors as use- 
ful critics ; but without further reasoning, 
one may invite attention to some considera- 
tions in regard to Othello suggested by quo- 
tations from memoirs of the profession and 
other records, and especially from Booth's 
annotated acting-copy, extracts from which, 
although not made with any view to publica- 
tion, may be found in the Variorum edition 
of the play. 

Mr. White, in his satirical essay upon 
The Acting of Iago, expresses the opinion 
that all the modern impersonations are in- 
adequate, and that the fault springs from 
a radical misconception of the character. 
Theatrical companies are made up, every 
one knows, with an actor for each of the 
varieties of human nature which are usual 
in a play ; so far as character is concerned, 
they enact types. Iago, of course, falls to 
the lot of the " heavy villain," whose aim, 
in stage life, is to do his wickedest always, 
everywhere, and in as many guises as pos- 
sible ; he is continually pointing to the mark 
of Cain on his forehead, so that there shall 



SOME ACTORS* CRITICISMS. 169 

be no mistake about bis identity. " I tbink," 
says Booth, — and the criticism holds all 
the meat of Mr. White's essay in a nutshell, 
— " the light comedian should play the vil- 
lain's part, not the ' heavy man ; ' I mean 
the Shakespearean villains." In consonance 
with this is his reiterated advice to his Iago 
to think evil all the time, but not to show- 
it ; to be the prince of good fellows, inex- 
haustible in bonhomie, genial, jovial, gentle- 
manly, — the friend and pleasant companion 
whom every one liked, whom Desdemona 
trifled with, and Cassio respected for his 
soldiership, and Othello trusted as a man as 
faithful in love as he was wise in the world. 
" A certain bluffness," Booth says " (which 
my temperament does not afford), should 
be added to preserve the military flavor of 
the character : in this particular I fail ut- 
terly ; my Iago lacks the soldierly quality." 
So far, certainly, Booth does not differ from 
Mr. White in his conception of the bearing, 
the outward manner and sensible aspect, of 
the Venetian liar. Let us look at it from 
Mr. White's point of view : " Edwin Booth's 
Iago is not externally a mere hardened vil- 
lain, but a super-subtle Venetian, who works 
out his devilish plans with a dexterous light- 



170 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 

ness of touch and smooth sinuosity of move- 
ment that suggest the transmigration of a 
serpent into human form. And in his vis- 
age, and, above all, in his eye, burns the 
venom of his soul. . . . But even Edwin 
Booth's Iago, although much finer and more 
nearly consistent with itself and with the 
facts of the tragedy than any other that is 
known to the annals of the stage, is not the 
Iago that Shakespeare drew." But what is 
it that is lacking ? Mr. White paints Iago 
as the popular flatterer, the sympathetic 
sycophant, the gay, easy-going, pleased, and 
pleasing fellow ; and, so far as the side 
shown to the world is concerned, this is 
Booth's conception, and (allowing for the 
defect of soldier -like frankness which he 
feels in himself) it is his impersonation. 
Why is it not, then, Shakespeare's Iago ? 
Mr. White is ready with his answer: Be- 
cause Shakespeare's Iago would do no harm, 
except to advance his fortunes ; he had no 
malice ; he was merely selfish, utterly un- 
scrupulous as to his means of obtaining what 
he sought, ready to win his gain at any ruin. 
Now, it is clear that the evil which Mr. 
White has just said burns in the actor's eye 
is not mere selfishness, not the cold light of 



SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 171 

calculation simply, with no more rooted pas- 
sion ; it is just what Mr. White says Iago 
did not have, — it is malice. So one gets the 
hint ; and on searching the remarks of Booth 
to see what indications there are of his con- 
ception of the essence of Iago's soul, the 
spring of his motive, the changing emotions 
that enveloped his thoughts at their birth, 
one perceives at once that, while Booth 
would have Iago outwardly amiable, he has 
not the least idea of reducing the dye of 
villainy in which the character has been 
steeped by those of old time. Inside, Booth 
has no doubt, Iago was a spirit of hate, and 
he knows at what moments of anxious in- 
terest, at what crises of the temptation and 
the plotting, this will gleam out in the ex- 
pression of the eye, or in those slight tell- 
tale changes which are natural to the most 
self-possessed man, and are significant to us 
only because we are on the watch for them. 
By observing, consequently, with what pas- 
sages he connects this devilish malignancy 
of nature in Iago, one can judge, as between 
him and Mr. White, what justification he 
has for making Iago cruel as well as self- 
ish, and revengeful as well as ambitious. 
Mr. White's theory is that Iago wished to 



172 SOME ACTOBS' CBITICISMS. 

supplant Cassio, and ruined Desdemona in 
order to accomplish this end ; that he used 
his suspicion of Othello's intimacy with his 
wife almost as an after-thought, to bolster 
up his purpose with an excuse ; and that, 
having chosen his method with perfect in- 
difference to its morality or its humanity, he 
overreached himself and failed. This view 
may gain upon one by its plausible and em- 
phatic setting forth, just as pleas for Judas 
Iscariot or any other client of a clever devil's 
advocate may do, but only momentarily ; for 
when one attempts to adjust the speeches 
of Iago, word by word and line by line, to 
this conception, especially with such notes 
of direction and caution as these of Booth's 
to the actor, echoing the text, as they do, 
through all modulations of suspicion, sus- 
pense, and suppressed passion, the idea of 
an Iago without malice simply dissolves, and 
leaves not a rack behind. In reality, this 
new notion of Mr. White's is only the old 
story that Iago is motiveless, which has dis- 
turbed so many critics, and given occasion 
to such marvelous explanations of his vil- 
lainy. The disparity between the moral 
causes and the mortal results, between the 
errors and the penalties of the victims, has 



SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 173 

been widely felt ; the attempt is consequently 
made to ascribe a cause for the catastrophe 
that shall justify it to the reason; and nat- 
urally one writer has over-accented and ex- 
aggerated one element in the play, and a 
second writer another element, and so on; 
but Mr. White bears away the palm from 
all in his assertion that Iago did all the mis- 
chief just to get on in the world, and that 
the only reason it was so great was because 
of the unlimited power for harm in the union 
of ability to flatter with utter unserupulous- 
ness in a man's make-up. Shakespeare gives 
the key-note of the action in the very first 
words Iago utters, unheard except by his 
own bosom. What was the first thought on 
his lips then? "I hate the Moor." And 
perhaps in that most difficult moment of the 
role, the climax of Iago's fate, the elder 
Booth was right in making the expression of 
this intense enmity dominant in " the Par- 
thian look which Iago, as he was borne off, 
wounded and in bonds, gave Othello, — a 
Gorgon stare, in which hate seemed both 
petrified and petrifying." In this matter 
the actors seem to carry it over the editor, 
who, indeed, was in that essay a better social 
satirist than Shakespearean scholar ; and, to 



174 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 

our mind, the conception of Mr. White is 
too inharmonious, also, with the intellectual 
power and the delight in its exercise so 
marked in Shakespeare's and in Booth's 
Iago. 

There is more scope for different inter- 
pretations in Othello's case than in Iago's. 
Othello, it is obvious to any one of the least 
insight, is a character in whom temperament 
counts for so much more than anything else 
as practically to possess the whole man ; his 
actions proceed directly from his nature; 
his doubts and suspicions act at once upon 
his heart, and are converted into emotion of 
the most simple and primitive type almost 
instantaneously; his mental agony itself 
tends to become blind physical suffering ; he 
does not think, — he feels. It is in the 
expression of temperament that the actor is 
left most free by the dramatist, is least 
shackled by words, and oftenest relies upon 
other modes of utterance, among which (we 
too easily forget) language is only one. 

In Othello, consequently, who is the crea- 
ture of his temperament, the actor influences 
the character to an unusual degree ; and as 
the range of feeling is from the lowest notes 



SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 175 

of tender happiness to the explosions of un- 
limited despair, the way in which the actor 
conceives of feeling, his ideas of what makes 
it noble, and of the manner in which a grand 
nature would express it, affect the play pro- 
foundly. A certain bent has been given to 
the stage interpretation and also to criticism, 
by the notion that Shakespeare meant to 
exhibit in Othello a barbaric passion, the 
boiling up of a savage nature, the Oriental 
fervor and rashness, the daemon of the Moor- 
ish race. Yet nothing is plainer in Shake- 
speare than his utter disregard of historical 
accuracy ; he never depicted a race type, ex- 
cept the Jewish. If Theseus is an Athenian, 
or Coriolanus or Caesar himself a Roman, 
then Othello may be a Moor ; but it is most 
conformable to the facts to regard them all 
as simply ideal men, who take from their 
circumstances a color of nationality and a 
place in time, but who are essentially all of 
one race. The view of those actors who 
give Othello a ferocity of emotion because 
he is a Moor, or of those critics who discern 
in the violence and brute unreason of some 
players in this part something to praise on 
the score of Othello's birth under a hot 
Mauritania!! sun deserves no sympathy. The 



176 SOME ACTOBS' CBITICISMS. 

Oriental touch in the impersonation ought 
not to go beyond such slight signs and 
tokens as the crescent scimiter, — of which 
Booth says, " It is harmless," — if we are to 
keep to Shakespeare's art as something bet- 
ter than a costumer's. Othello does not ex- 
hibit one extravagance that requires to be 
excused by the reflection that it is natural 
to an alien race, though not to the English. 
But within the limits of the character con- 
ceived as merely ideal, there is a fine op- 
portunity for difference among actors, and 
they have availed themselves of it. To in- 
dicate it by a word, Othello's passion seems 
to have been the cardinal thought of Kean, 
irresistible, compulsive as "the Pontick Sea," 
impressive by its main force and elemental 
sweep ; Fechter, whose conception of noble- 
ness of nature was a poor one, sank all the 
heroic in the melodrama to which the situa- 
tions lent themselves ; and Booth, giving far 
more distinctness to Othello's suffering, so 
that his revenge becomes hardly more than 
an incident in the course of his own soul's 
torture, reveals the scene of the tragedy at 
once as in Othello's breast, where the spirit 
of evil is feeding on a mighty but guileless 
heart. It is not Desdemona's death that 



SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 177 

is the climax, — that is mere pity ; but 
the tragic element finds its conclusion in 
Othello's last speech and stroke. The in- 
tensity of Kean or the ideality of Booth, 
working upon the tragic temperament in 
each, must produce Othello with a differ- 
ence : one tempts to excess in ferocity, the 
other in pathos ; but either is consistent with 
the text. After all, it is with great actors 
as with poets, — their creations partake of 
their own nature, in all heroic and ideal 
parts ; but if, as is thought, sympathy is the 
best revealer of the inner meaning of works 
of the imagination, certainly the disciplined 
and habitual enacting of great roles by ac- 
tors of genius ought to be a source of light 
and knowledge regarding them, notwith- 
standing the allowance that is to be made 
for the " personal error " of individuality. 

It is a striking quality in the immortality 
of The Merchant of Venice that it has sur- 
vived a change in the public mind in its at- 
titude toward the Jewish people. To the 
Elizabethans, and Shakespeare among them, 
the Jew was hateful. It may well be ques- 
tioned to what extent Shakespeare himself, 
with all the tolerance that his understanding 



178 SOME ACTORS 1 CRITICISMS. 

of the springs of human nature gave him, 
felt the pity in the dramatic situation of 
Shy lock that a modern audience must feel. 
Booth's conception of Shakespeare's creation 
is too direct and natural not to justify itself 
to the student, — " ' an inhuman wretch, in- 
capable of pity, void and empty from any 
dram of mercy.' It has been said that he 
was an affectionate father and a faithful 
friend. When, where, and how does he 
manifest the least claim to such commenda- 
tion ? Tell me that, and unyoke ! 'T was 
the money value of Leah's ring that he 
grieved over, not its association with her, 
else he would have shown some affection for 
her daughter, which he did not or she would 
not have called her home i a hell,' robbed 
and left him. Shakespeare makes her do 
these un- Hebrew things to intensify the 
baseness of Shylock's nature. If we side 
with him in his self-defense, 't is because we 
have charity, which he had not ; if we pity 
him under the burden of his merited pun- 
ishment, 't is because we are human, which 
he is not, except in shape, and even that, I 
think, should indicate the crookedness of his 
nature." Booth goes on to justify this tra- 
ditional conception by an easy argument 



SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 179 

against the notion of " the heroic Hebrew," 
the type of the vengeance of a persecuted 
race, whose wrongs justify its acts. He re- 
fers to the " dangerous i bit of business ' " 
when Shylock whets his knife. " Would 
the heroic Hebrew have stooped to such a 
paltry action ? No, never, in the very white- 
heat of his pursuit of vengeance ! But ven- 
geance is foreign to Shylock's thought ; 't is 
revenge he seeks, and he gets just what all 
who seek it get, — ' sooner or later,' as the 
saying is." 

This characterization is not too vigorous, 
nor does it go too far. We may find it not 
only in Shylock as Shakespeare drew him, 
but reflected also from Antonio. It is in 
Antonio personally that the attitude of the 
mediaeval Christian toward the Jew is found. 
The unexplained melancholy of Antonio, his 
fidelity in high-minded friendship, and the 
dignity of his bearing under the cruelty to 
which he is exposed have obscured to us the 
other side of his character as the Rialto 
merchant. We see more of Bassanio's An- 
tonio than of Shylock's : the man who had 
interfered with the usurer in every way and 
personally maltreated him, and was as like 
to do the same again ; the proud, hard- 



180 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 

hearted, and insulting magnifico whom Shy- 
lock hated for himself. Antonio is every 
whit as heartless to the Jew in the hour of 
his triumph as Shylock was to him when the 
balance leaned the other way. His cruelty 
is lacking only in the physical element ; it 
is not bloody, but it goes to the bone and 
marrow of Shylock's nature none the less. 
There is no sign that Shakespeare saw any 
wrong in all this. It was thus that the 
Christians looked upon the Jews, and they 
thought such treatment right. Shakespeare 
differed from others — from Marlowe, for 
example, in his delineation of the Jew at 
Malta — in one point only : he was able to 
take Shylock's point of view, to understand 
his motives, to assign the reasons with which 
revenge justified its own motions ; in a word, 
to represent Shylock's humanity. The 
speeches he puts into the Jew's mouth are 
intense and eloquent expressions of the rea- 
soning of that " lodged hate " in his bosom ; 
they are true to fact and to nature ; on our 
ears they come with overwhelming force, 
and it is impossible to our thoughts that 
Shakespeare could have written them with- 
out sympathy for the wrongs that they set 
forth with such fiery heat. But when from 



SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 181 

this it is argued that Shakespeare, in writing 
this play, made a deliberate plea for tolera- 
tion, and carried it as far as the necessities 
of his plot and the temper of his times per- 
mitted, then it is needful to remind ourselves 
of what Booth calls " the baseness of Shy- 
lock's nature." Shakespeare did represent 
him as base, with avarice, cunning, and re- 
venge for the constituent elements of his 
character ; he did not hesitate to let the 
exhibition of these low qualities approach 
the farcical, as he would never have done 
had he thought of the Jew as in any sense 
heroic. Shylock had suffered insult and 
wrong, but there was nothing in him indi- 
vidually to excite commiseration. From be- 
ginning to end he shows no noble quality. 
Modern sympathy with him, apart from the 
pity that tragedy necessarily stirs, is social 
sympathy, not personal ; it is because he is 
an outcast and belongs to an outcast race, 
because every man's hand is against him and 
against all his people, that the audience of 
this century perceives an injustice inherent 
in his position itself, antecedent to, and in- 
dependent of, any of his acts ; and this in- 
justice is ignored in the play. The feeling 
which Shylock, as a person, excites, and 



182 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 

should excite, is nearer that which Lady 
Martin describes as her experience : "I have 
always felt in the acting that my desire to 
find extenuations for Shylock's race and for 
himself leaves me, and my heart grows al- 
most as stony as his own. I see his fiendish 
nature fully revealed. I have seen the knife 
sharpened to cut quickly through the flesh, 
the scales brought forward to weigh it ; have 
watched the cruel, eager eyes, all strained 
and yearning to see the gushing blood well- 
ing from the side ' nearest the heart,' and 
gloating over the fancied agonies and death- 
pangs of his bitter foe. This man-monster, 
this pitiless, savage nature, is beyond the 
pale of humanity ; it must be made power- 
less to hurt. I have felt that with him the 
wrongs of his race are really as nothing 
compared with his own remorseless hate. 
He is no longer the wronged and suffering 
man ; and I longed to pour down on his 
head the ' justice ' he has clamored for, and 
will exact without pity." Upon this matter 
Spedding admits of no reply. " The best 
contribution," he says, " which I can offer 
to this discussion is the expression of an old 
man's difficulty in accepting these new dis- 
coveries of profound moral and political de« 



SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 183 

signs underlying Shakespeare's choice and 
treatment of his subjects. I believe he was 
a man of business, — that his principal busi- 
ness was to produce plays which would 
draw. . . . But if, instead of looking about 
for a story to 4 please ' the Globe audience, 
he had been in search of a subject under 
cover of which he might steal into their 
minds ' a more tolerant feeling toward the 
Hebrew race,' I cannot think he would have 
selected for his hero a rich Jewish merchant 
plotting the murder of a Christian rival by 
means of a fraudulent contract, which made 
death the penalty of non-payment at the 
day, and insisting on the exaction of it. In 
a modern Christian audience it seems to be 
possible for a skillful actor to work on the 
feelings of an audience so far as to make 
a man engaged in such a business an object 
of respectful sympathy. But can anybody 
believe that in times when this would have 
been much more difficult, Shakespeare would 
have chosen such a case as a favorable one 
to suggest toleration to a public prejudiced 
against Jews ? " 

The omnipresent devil's advocate has sev- 
eral times come to Shylock's defense with a 
legal plea. Those who could find something 



184 SOME ACTOBS' CRITICISMS. 

to urge in extenuation of Judas Iscariot had 
an easy task in showing that the Jew of 
Venice was more sinned against than sin- 
ning. The decisions of the young doctor 
who came armed with the recommendation 
of the learned Bellario have been overruled 
in every court of appeal. The bond itself 
is declared invalid, inasmuch as it contained 
an immoral proviso in the article that sought 
Antonio's death; the attempt to defeat it, 
its validity having once been granted, by de- 
nying the right to draw blood and requiring 
the exact amount of a pound of flesh to be 
cut out, is characterized as a wretched quib- 
ble, and set aside on the ground that a right 
once allowed carries with it the minor rights 
to make it effectual ; the denial of the orig- 
inal debt for the reason that it had been ten- 
dered and refused in open court is declared 
a gross error, such tender having no other 
result than to destroy any claim for interest 
subsequently. But not to mention all the 
grave reasons alleged to break down the 
reputation of the Court of Venice and show 
the illegality of its judgments, it is clear 
that on legal grounds the case was very 
badly managed, and in the event the Jew 
met with no better fortune than was the lot 



SOME ACTORS 1 CRITICISMS. 185 

of his race before an unscrupulous and hos- 
tile tribunal everywhere. Nevertheless, the 
disputants upon the other side, who allege the 
substantial justice of the decisions rendered, 
do well to remove the discussion out of the 
plane of legality. There is much that is 
weighty in their argument. Shylock must 
be regarded as standing, after the nature of 
Judaism, for the law as a thing of the letter ; 
this is the justice which he demands, not 
real, but literal; and if, by a still more 
strict interpretation of the letter of the bond 
than he had thought of, his claim was de- 
feated, the audience will acknowledge the 
relevancy of the new point that is made, 
and will enjoy the spectacle of the Biter 
Bit, in which there is always an element of 
comic justice. As to the quibble involved, 
that belongs to the nature of literal inter- 
pretation always. Thus the matter is not 
without defense even on this level. But 
what really pleases the audience is not the 
method, but the fact, of the Jew's defeat; 
and in the fact, however brought about, lies 
the ethical element, the victory of real over 
illusory justice, of equity over legality, of 
the right over the pretense of right. Shake- 
speare was not expressly philosophical ; but 



186 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 

there is little straining of the facts of the 
case in the view that in the discomfiture of 
that "law" which the Jew invoked, in the 
signal defeat inflicted on the letter of the 
bond, there is a suggestion of the conflict 
between Judaism and Christianity, the lit- 
eral and the spiritual, the law and that jus- 
tice with its elements of mercy into which 
the law develops, which is one of the great 
phases of historical civilization. Whether 
Shakespeare put it there is immaterial ; but 
that a modern audience finds it there, and 
that it was at least dimly present to an 
Elizabethan audience, is hardly to be ques- 
tioned. The idea is a simple and ancient 
one ; and in it is to be found whatever eth- 
ical meaning the play may have. 

But it ought to be always remembered 
that the primary endowment of Shakespeare 
was the artistic temperament : he was a poet 
first, and everything else afterwards. To 
say this is the same thing with saying — 
though it must be stated briefly — that the 
ethical principle in him was a necessity of 
the imagination, not of the understanding ; 
was vision rather than inference ; was a part 
and not the whole. One can no more im- 
agine life truly without ethics than he can 



SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 187 

imagine mass without cohesion ; a creative 
genius, consequently, a man of imagination 
all compact, does not necessarily start from 
ethics in moulding his works, but it is more 
likely that the moral principle which his 
works must contain as a part of their real- 
ity will be secondary and derivative. Shake- 
speare is ethical because he imagined life 
truly ; he did not imagine life truly because 
he had thought out, in Lord Bacon's man- 
ner, the general principles of morals. 



SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT, COLE- 
RIDGE, AND WORDSWORTH. 

Sir George Beaumont appears to have 
been one of the most agreeable of men. 
He had not merely high breeding, but hu- 
manity of disposition, delightful compan- 
ionableness, and the refinement that springs 
from artistic pursuits. Haydon accuses his 
manners of a want of moral courage. " What 
his taste dictated to be right, he would 
shrink from asserting if it shocked the pre- 
judices of others or put himself to a mo- 
ment's inconvenience," was the fault that 
this critic had in mind ; but this is only to 
class him with the men who do not think 
that the truth is always to be spoken in so- 
ciety, and prefer tact to an aggressive ego- 
tism. Sir Humphry Davy notices espe- 
cially that he was a " remarkably sensible 
man, which I mention because it is some- 
what remarkable in a painter of genius who 
is at the same time a man of rank and an 
exceedingly amusing companion." Southey 



BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 189 

was struck by the apparent happiness of his 
life, and the absence of any reference to 
afflictions or anxieties that he might have 
experienced, and says that he " had as little 
liking for country sports as for public busi- 
ness of any kind," being absorbed by art 
and nature ; and, to add Scott's kind words 
of him in his diary, that excellent judge 
writes, " Sir George Beaumont 's dead ; by 
far the most sensible and pleasing man I 
ever knew. Kind, too, in his nature, and 
generous, — gentle in society, and of those 
mild manners which tend to soften the caus- 
ticity of the general London tone of persi- 
flage and personal satire. I am very sorry 
— as much as it is in my nature to be — for 
one whom I could see but seldom." This is 
a concert of praise which it is a pleasure to 
associate with the name of the man who 
was, chiefly, the founder of the National 
Gallery in Trafalgar Square. 

He was a friend of the artists of his time, 
and a patron of Wilkie and Hay don when 
they needed aid. In the latter's autobiog- 
raphy there is a bright account of a fort- 
night's visit paid by these two to Coleorton, 
Sir George's country-seat, which brings the 
interior life there vividly to the eye, though 



190 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 

it borrows something from the unconscious 
humor of the narrator, who always fills the 
scene with himself in the leading part. One 
pauses to note a characteristic sentence of 
the incorrigible beggar in which he breaks 
out with the indignant remark, " All my 
friends were always advising me what to do 
instead of advising the Government what to 
do for me." Sir George, however, had other 
friends, and most noteworthy of all, Words- 
worth, of whom he first heard from Cole- 
ridge. Before meeting him, understanding 
that the two friends wished to live in the 
same neighborhood, he bought and presented 
to Wordsworth the little property of Apple- 
thwaite near Greta Hall, Coleridge's abode. 
Wordsworth never used the ground for the 
purpose for which it was given, but it re- 
mained in his possession. From this time, 
1803, a close friendship grew up between 
his family at Grasmere and the one at Cole- 
orton, grounded upon common interests and 
cemented with mutual exchanges of kind- 
ness and regard, so that it survived until 
the death of Sir George and Lady Beau- 
mont, herself an excellent woman, of whom 
Crabb Robinson wrote, " She is a gentle- 
woman of great sweetness and dignity, I 



BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 191 

should think among the most interesting 
persons in the country." 

Of the two poets Coleridge was at first 
more intimate with the Beaumonts. This 
was in 1803, the period of his illness, just 
previous to the voyage to Malta. The let- 
ters he wrote are very painful to read. The 
subject is usually the ego ; and in reading 
the apologies of the writer for treating of 
this ever-present theme, and his observa- 
tions on his own lack of vanity and the 
danger he is in of undervaluing his powers 
and works, one can scarcely fail to be struck 
by the identity in many respects of the ego- 
tism of the overweening and of the self- 
depreciating kinds. The aspects are differ- 
ent, but the weakness has the same root. In 
Coleridge it was, perhaps, no more than a 
question of the state of his stomach whether 
his assiduous interest in himself should re- 
sult in intellectual pride or in self-abase- 
ment ; but without giving too severe a touch, 
it is clear enough that his eye, when fixed 
on himself, was on the wrong object. 

The letters to the Beaumonts are charac- 
terized by this complaining and absorbing 
egotism of the invalid, unfortified by pa- 
tience, resolution, or even self-respect. The 



192 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 

ravages of disease in its physical aspects, the 
laying bare of bodily conditions and symp- 
toms of decay, would be in themselves intol- 
erably disagreeable, but it is much worse to 
be obliged to attend at the sick-bed of the 
mind ; and in Coleridge's case the internal 
weakness of the spirit excites the greatest 
pity, and this feeling nearly passes involun- 
tarily into disgust. The sensibility of his 
nervous organization was acute. He speaks 
of times when, as he was accusing himself 
of insensibility through incapacity to feel, his 
" whole frame has gone crash, as it were." 
Under the excitement of his emotions, he 
dissolves in weakness ; the spectacle is not 
a pleasant one ; there is something almost 
ignoble in such loss of self-control. When 
Wordsworth recited to him, if one can fancy 
such a thing, the entire thirteen books on 
the growth of his own mind, in 1807, Cole- 
ridge composed a poem, not very coherent or 
noble, though with personal pathos, in which 
he says that when he rose from his seat, he 
" found himself in prayer." It was appar- 
ently not an unusual termination to the ac- 
cess of emotion, and it occurred more than 
once in his relations with the Beaumonts. 
The mention of it, however, in his corre- 



BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 193 

spondence with them, offends one, not in it- 
self, but by the manner of it ; indeed, the 
manner of his earlier letters is indescriba- 
ble. Their sentiment is so tremulous and 
overwrought with fever that they resemble 
maundering ; they are " sicklied o'er " with 
mental disease, and belong to the pathology 
of genius. 

One long epistle, in which he devotes him- 
self to an analysis of his mental condition 
at the time when he was what is now known 
as a Social Democrat, shows by an eminent 
example in what ways the minds of young 
men of enthusiasm, who have caught the 
contagion of new ideas, commonly act, and 
how their tongues are kept going. Cole- 
ridge and Southey were rampant young 
radicals for about ten months, and might 
many times have been justly thrown into 
jail for the use of unlawful language and 
seditiously fomenting the passions of the 
people. Coleridge ascribes the beginning 
of his ramblings from the true path of re- 
spectable politics partly to his intellectual 
isolation among his relatives and virtuous 
acquaintances generally, who thought that 
his " opinions were the drivel of a babe, but 
the guilt attached to them, — this was the 



194 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 

gray hair and rigid muscle of inveterate 
depravity ; " and partly, he declares, it was 
due to the thirst for kindness planted, in 
himself, in that " me, who," he says, " from 
my childhood have had no avarice, no ambi- 
tion, whose very vanity in my vainest mo- 
ments was nine tenths of it the desire and 
delight and necessity of loving and of being 
beloved," — needs which he found satisfied 
in the welcome and company of " the Dem- 
ocrats." So he fell among evil companions. 
On becoming an agitator upon the platform 
he succumbed to the temptations of the 
fluent speaker, gifted "with an ebullient 
fancy, a flowing utterance, a light and dan- 
cing heart, and a disposition to catch time 
by the very rapidity of my own motion, and 
to speak vehemently from mere verbal asso- 
ciations ; choosing sentences and sentiments 
for the very reason which would have made 
me recoil with a dying away of the heart 
and unutterable horror from the actions ex- 
pressed in such sentiments and sentences, 
namely, because they were wild and original, 
and vehement and fantastic." Here is a 
choice specimen of his eloquence, on the oc- 
casion of a supper by some Lord, to com- 
memorate an Austrian victory: "This is a 



BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 195 

true Lord's Supper in the communion of 
darkness! This is a Eucharist of Hell! a 
sacrament cf misery ! over each morsel and 
each drop of which the spirit of some mur- 
dered innocent cries aloud to God, This is 
my body ! and this is my blood ! " There is 
one sin against society, however, which he 
declined to commit, and he took great credit 
to himself for his obstinate refusal. He 
joined no party, club, or any of the radical 
societies, which he characterizes as " asca- 
rides in the bowels of the state, subsisting 
on the weakness and diseasedness, and hav- 
ing for their final object the death of that 
state, whose life had been their birth and 
growth, and continued to be their sole nour- 
ishment." He remained outside of these 
entangling alliances, a free-lance speechifier, 
in the condition of mind of the willing mar- 
tyr : " The very clank of the chains that 
were to be put about my limbs would not at 
that time have deterred me from a strong 
phrase or striking metaphor, although I had 
had no other inducement to the use of the 
same except the wantonness of luxuriant ima- 
gination, and my aversion to abstain from 
anything simply because it was dangerous." 
Such was Coleridge at twenty-four years, — 



196 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 

the age at which Emmett was executed; 
whose death called out this long letter of rem- 
iniscences concerning his own career as an 
agitator, and of reflections upon the impulses 
and justification of revolutionary orators, 
their tempations, errors, and illusions. He 
understood the fate of Emmett with greater 
clearness because of this little episode in his 
own life, and it is noticeable that he has the 
grace not to think that the young patriot's 
career bore too much resemblance to his 
own ; but this confession of his foolishness 
in general, spread out somewhat magnilo- 
quently before the eyes of his aristocratic 
correspondent, is a lesson in human nature 
well worth a moment's attention from con- 
servative and orderly people. 

Coleridge's career — if a brief digression 
may be pardoned here — was only too much 
in keeping with the temperament of these 
letters to the Beaumonts. Wherever one 
comes upon it in the memoirs of the time, 
the story is the same. Soften it as we may, 
that career was one of those, too frequent 
among men of letters, that can never be 
told, so marred by disease and by moral 
feebleness, so full of shame and supineness 
and waste, that it must be kept out of sight. 



BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 197 

During the years of his maturity he was a 
broken man, and knew himself to be such ; 
from the time that, in becoming the victim 
of opium, he lost what little will-power was 
originally his, he felt that the spirit of im- 
agination had left his house of life, and in 
its place was henceforward 

" Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vail}, 
And genius given, and knowledge won in vain ; " 

and in this mood of pervading despondency 
he seems always in fancy to be haunting the 
grave of his dead self. This consciousness 
of his loss, though it had more of the stupor 
of despair than of the sharpness of peni- 
tence, lends some impressiveness to his 
story ; but this pain was not searching 
enough to save him for himself, nor of a 
kind to make men oblivious of those violent 
contrasts in his life which offend our sense 
of Tightness. It is a morally confusing spec- 
tacle to see genius professing the highest 
knowledge of the secret things of God, but 
itself wrecked; and it requires something 
more than the poet's sorrow at the wither- 
ing of his wreath to reconcile such an an- 
tithesis. 

Then, too, although Coleridge's poetic im- 
agination undoubtedly was quenched at once, 



198 BEAUMONT, COLEBIDGE, ETC. 

or gave out only brief and random flashes 
in his manhood, it may well be questioned 
whether the waste of his faculties was not 
due quite as much to mismanagement of 
the mind as to the palsying of his powers 
of effort, purpose, or orderly reduction of 
thought. He lived in the period of univer- 
sal philosophers, and in his study of meta- 
physics and theology in Germany he must 
have fixed in his mind the habit of includ- 
ing the omne scihile in his system. This 
was the more easy for him, as he had in un- 
usual proportion that false comprehensive- 
ness which seizes on knowledge, not by all its 
relations as it stands in the body of science, 
but by some particular relation which it may 
seem to bear, truly or untruly, to some pre- 
conceived idea that has been taken as the 
organizing principle of the new scheme. It 
is because of their common participation in 
this method that poetry and philosophy, in 
the old sense, approach so much nearer each 
other than either does to science. It is plain 
to any one who reads the topics of Cole- 
ridge's discourses that his mind ranged 
through a vast circuit of knowledge habitu- 
ally, but also that it touched the facts only 
at single points and superficially ; in other 



BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 199 

words, he displays compass rather than 
grasp. In dealing with the mass of his 
learning, he showed no lack of systematiz- 
ing power, though it may easily be believed 
that in conversation with chance visitors the 
fine filaments of logical connection escaped 
their sight. The trouble was in the original 
mode of elaborating the system — the old 
Greek way of philosophizing by subtle ma- 
nipulation of analogies, convenient facts, 
half -understood harmonies of this with that, 
arbitrary constructions, with now and then 
a dead plunge into the unfathomable. To 
borrow Coleridge's own distinction, this pro- 
cedure is to logic what fancy is to the im- 
agination — a freak of the mind partly out 
of relation to the truth of things. It is the 
modern form of scholasticism. 

Coleridge, however, whose speculative pow- 
ers were thus employed, is believed to have 
been a great light to those who had eyes to 
see. What particular truth Maurice and 
others derived from him is, nevertheless, not 
evident. He shared the awakening power 
that idealists possess, generally in propor- 
tion to their consistency and the intensity of 
their personal conviction. Idealism, by the 
very fact that it is an enfranchisement from 



200 BEAUMONT, COLEBIDGE, ETC. 

sense, is a tonic to the mind; it quickens 
the activity of thought and facilitates its 
processes because it assumes the mastery of 
the universe, and makes reality pliable to its 
hand. This may or may not be lawful, but 
it generates a feeling of command and of 
liberty highly favorable to spiritual develop- 
ment. To some men impressionable on that 
side of their nature Coleridge was the giver 
of this freedom, and this has been the case 
especially with members of the clergy who 
are closely attached to theological dogma. 
Such persons found in Coleridge's mind the 
rare and curious coexistence of fixed dogma 
with incessant speculation : he afforded the 
sense of untrammeled investigation without 
once disturbing the certainty of the pre- 
judged cause. This phantom of liberalism 
was a very quieting tutelar genius to some 
educated men, who thus kept up a semblance 
of thinking; but influence of this sort is 
necessarily transitory. His Scriptural ren- 
derings of philosophy give place to those of 
other theologians, who rationalize on new 
grounds of scientific knowledge instead of 
German metaphysics, while the stimulation 
that was furnished by his idealism may be 
more simply and directly derived from less 



BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 201 

involved and abstruse thinkers. His theol- 
ogy and metaphysics, in pursuit of which 
he wasted his powers, are already seen to be 
transient. On the other hand, his criticism 
has articulated the works of minor authors 
who have themselves written in a formal 
style, nor has its influence been harmed by 
its frequent over - refinement and fanciful- 
ness ; and his poetry has remained untouched 
by time. It belongs to the period of his 
early enthusiasm, before he had become too 
dulled for the breath of inspiration to kindle 
him; and fortunately one can read nearly 
all the best of it without a thought of the 
dreary after-life of the poet, which has no 
vital interest to any one except as an illustra- 
tion of prolonged failure due to many causes, 
but not less to a lack of mental than of moral 
self-government. He infiltrated a peculiar 
intellectual life into the clergy of his time, 
but in them it came to nothing more tan- 
gible and permanent than in himself. Will 
it be long before Carlyle's picture of the 
Seer at Highgate will be the only supple- 
ment to The Ancient Mariner, so far as the 
general knowledge of Coleridge is concerned, 
and all between nothing but the weariness of 
the opium-eater's hiding? 



202 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 

Perhaps the serenity of Wordsworth's 
home at Grasmere gains by the miserable 
contrast. Thither Coleridge came for in- 
vigoration; thither, when he finally sepa- 
rated from his wife, he brought or sent the 
children ; and when he could not or would 
not retire to the hospitality and pleasant 
companionship of the household where he 
found the feminine sympathy which he had 
failed of in his own marriage, Wordsworth 
would set out to visit him with moral 
support and cheer. A different interest 
united Wordsworth and Sir George Beau- 
mont ; it was the love of nature. Landscape 
was the subject of their thoughts. Sir 
George painted it, Wordsworth poetized it ; 
in the life of both it was a permanent re- 
source to which they constantly resorted, 
and they liked to blend their work in this 
solvent — the pictures of the one becoming 
a text for the poems of the other, and vice 
versa. The interest Wordsworth felt in 
landscape gardening, in modifying wild na- 
ture, and his ideas regarding the methods 
and aims of the art, are brought out by the 
part he had in planning the grounds at Cole- 
orton. Sir George rebuilt these, and, in 
laying out the winter garden in particular, 



BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 203 

he had frequent recourse to the taste of his 
friend ; and as Wordsworth was that year 
occupying the old farmhouse on the estate, 
the business of thinking out and overseeing 
this work was at once diversion and restful 
employment amid his poetic labors. He 
wrote at great length on the subject to Lady 
Beaumont, and laid before her an elaborate 
plain full of ivy, holly, juniper, yews, open 
sunshine glades, flower-borders, an alley, a 
bower, a spray-fountain, a quarry, a distant 
spire, a pool with two gold-fish, a vine-clad 
old cottage, and other things which are arti- 
ficial enough in the reading, but in reality 
seem remarkably well fitted to mingle the 
charm of cultivation with the wildness of 
the evergreens, and make a sheltering re- 
treat where the life of nature would linger 
longest in autumn and revive earliest in the 
warm sun. 

"Painters and poets," he wrote, "have 
had the credit of being reckoned the fathers 
of English gardening," and he felt thus in 
the line of succession in the art. It is most 
interesting to observe how he obtains sug- 
gestions from the poets, and makes their 
Pegasus plough his field. He was, of course, 
opposed to undue interference with nature 



204 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 

and the deformity it occasions, and also to 
the ostentation of the wealth or station of 
the owner. " It is a substitution of little 
things for great when we would put a whole 
country into a nobleman's livery," he says 
with spirit, and, declaring that the laying 
out of grounds is a liberal art not unlike 
poetry and painting, he goes on to pro* 
test against the monopoly of nature by the 
great ones of the earth, upon high aesthetic 
grounds. " No liberal art," he says, " aims 
merely at the gratification of an individual 
or a class ; the painter or poet is degraded 
in proportion as he does so. . . . If this 
be so when we are merely putting together 
words or colors, how much more ought the 
feeling to prevail when we are in the midst 
of the realities of things. . . . What, then, 
shall we say of many great mansions with 
their unqualified expulsion of human crea- 
tures from their neighborhood, happy or 
not — houses which do what is fabled of 
the upas tree — that they breathe out death 
and desolation?" These strictures on the 
aristocratic handling of land he continues 
for some pages in an interesting advocacy 
of aesthetic communism — still a suggestive 
topic. This sense of the beauty and gran< 



BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 205 

deur of nature as a universal boon, the desire 
to humanize the landscape without robbing 
it of its own essential character or of the 
minor charms of its native wildness, and a 
great delight in his own practical work of 
improving rubbish heaps, old walls, and 
broken ground into a winter retreat of sun- 
shine and evergreens and red-berried vines, 
with nooks and views fit for a poet's walk, 
are the qualities that still give interest to 
those half dozen letters about planting a 
waste acre of land. On the other hand, his 
genius, in which susceptibility to nature was 
so dominating a principle, seldom finds ex- 
pression in the prose of his letters with 
nearly the same clearness and purity as in 
his poems. There is one extract, however, 
which must be given, of a city scene from 
the country poet : — 

" I left Coleridge at seven o'clock on Sun- 
day morning and walked towards the city 
in a very thoughtful and melancholy state 
of mind. I had passed through Temple Bar 
and by St. Dunstan's, noticing nothing, and 
entirely occupied with my own thoughts, 
when, looking up, I saw before me the ave- 
nue of Fleet Street, silent, empty, and pure 
white, with a sprinkling of new-fallen snow, 



206 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 

not a cart or a carriage to obstruct the view, 
no noise, only a few soundless and dusky 
foot-passengers here and there. You re- 
member the elegant line of the curve of 
Ludgate Hill in which the avenue would 
terminate, and beyond, and towering above 
it, was the huge and majestic form of St. 
Paul's, solemnized by a thin veil of falling 
snow. I cannot say how much I was aifected 
at this unthought-of sight in such a place, 
and what a blessing I felt there is in habits 
of exalted imagination. My sorrow was con- 
trolled, and my uneasiness of mind— not 
quieted and relieved altogether — seemed at 
once to receive the gift of an anchor of se- 
curity." 

This is not poetry, but it is from the same 
pen as the sonnet on Westminster Bridge. 

Besides this taste for landscape, a special 
interest was taken by both friends in what 
poetry Wordsworth was composing from 
time to time. Wordsworth again expati- 
ates on the " awful truth that there neither 
is, nor can be, any genuine enjoyment of po- 
etry among nineteen out of twenty of those 
persons who live, or wish to live, in the 
broad light of the world," that is, in society ; 
and again defines his aims, " to console the 



BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 207 

afflicted ; to add sunshine to daylight, by 
making the happy happier ; to teach the 
young and the gracious of every age to see, 
to think, and feel, and therefore become, 
more actively and securely virtuous," etc. 
Here, too, are the calm and patient con- 
fidence in his own immortality, a serene 
foreknowledge of how the matter would end, 
though there are some dark spots in his pre- 
vision, as when he says that "the people 
would love Peter Bell " if only the critics 
would let them. It appears, too, that these 
poets were discreet in their confidential criti- 
cism of each other, and by no means blind to 
faults. Wordsworth notices that in South- 
ey's verse, notwithstanding picturesqueness 
and romance and a minor touch or two, 
44 there . is nothing that shows the hand of 
the great master ; " and Coleridge, with all 
his adoration for Wordsworth, even when 
declaring that he regarded the tale of the 
ruined cottage in the Excursion as " the 
finest poem in our language, comparing it 
with any of the same or similar length," 
could yet put his finger on the very centre 
of weakness in Wordsworth. " I have some- 
times fancied," he says, " that, having by the 
conjoint operation of his own experiences, 



208 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 

feelings, and reason M.nself convinced him- 
self of truths which the generality of peo- 
ple have either taken for granted from their 
infancy, or at least adopted in early life, he 
has attached all their own depth and weight 
to doctrines and words which come almost 
as truisms or commonplace to others." 

Wordsworth's last words are a farewell ; 
they illustrate how the love of nature and 
enjoyment of it, unlike most of youthful 
emotions, gain an increasing glow with years, 
and they express his faith and life in the 
most elementary terms : " I never had a 
higher relish for the beauties of nature than 
during this spring, nor enjoyed myself more. 
What manifold reason, my dear George, 
have you and I had to be thankful to Provi- 
dence ! Theologians may puzzle their heads 
about dogmas as they will ; the religion of 
gratitude cannot mislead us. Of that we 
are sure, and gratitude is the handmaid to 
hope, and hope the harbinger of faith. I 
look abroad upon nature, I think of the best 
part of our species, I lean upon my friends, 
and I meditate upon the Scriptures, espe- 
cially the Gospel of St. John ; and my creed 
rises up of itself with the ease of an exhala- 
tion, yet a fabric of adamant. God bless 
you, my ever dear friend." 



THREE MEN OF PIETY 

I. BUNYAN. 

The word genius is often used to conceal 
a puzzle which the critic, through defects of 
analytic power or sympathetic insight, is un- 
able to solve ; but perhaps this short and easy 
method was never more feebly resorted to 
than when a writer, with a strong prejudice 
in favor of sweetness and light, described 
Bunyan as a " Philistine of genius." In this 
designation there is much darkness and some 
acerbity. The wonderful thing about this 
man was not so much his gifts as the strange 
combination of them. There must be, of 
course, something extraordinary in any com- 
mon man who becomes a leader in the higher 
life of the race. The history of the Church, 
however, is starred with the names of the 
ignorant and the humble who, since the fish- 
ermen were called from their nets by Gali- 
lee, have been chosen to be shepherds of the 
flock and evangelists of the faith. Bunyan 
was visited with the experience of Protes- 



210 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 

tant Christendom, of which the successive 
terms are an outraged conscience, an of- 
fended God, and a miraculous pardon, and 
when he came to his peace he spread the 
glad news, acceptably to the pious, and con- 
vincingly to the impenitent ; but tens of 
thousands in Christian lands have passed 
through that same strait gate, and hundreds 
of them have discovered that they possessed 
the gift of tongues. Had Bunyan done no 
more his sermons would have turned to yel- 
low dust long ago, and his memory would be 
treasured only by a sect, for, eloquent as he 
was, he was not one of the missionaries who 
are world-famous. He wrote a book; and 
it turned out that this book of an unedu- 
cated man was a great literary classic. Had 
he written an epic it would have seemed less 
marvelous, because there is a popular super- 
stition that nature makes poets, but in prose 
does not enter into competition with the 
common school. Bunyan wrote verses, it is 
true, and the man who set the delectable 
mountains on the rim of earth had the mag- 
ical sight; but just as surely his doggerel 
shows that he had not the singing voice. 
He was a master of prose, and wrote a book 
that neighbors the Bible in our religious 
homes. 



THREE MEN OF PIETY. 211 

Two things are, of course, indispensable 
to a boy of genius, — imagination and the 
gift of expression. Now Bunyan was fond 
of representing himself as very wicked in 
youth; and so he was, from his own point 
of view. The worst he can say for himself 
is, that he lied and swore, without malice or 
injury to others, but because he had a talent 
for tales and oaths. It is not trifling to re- 
mark that his powers of invention and forci- 
ble Saxon speech appear to have found their 
first channel in this sort of mental activity. 
The possible openings for the development 
of genius in the tinker's cottage at Bedford 
were few. It is plain that the mind of the 
young man was one of intense life, and, in 
the lack of guidance and knowledge, wan- 
dered at random or turned to feed upon it- 
self. The only intellectual or moral ideas 
that came to him were conveyed from the 
Bible, mostly through the medium of the 
parish church in the years of the Puritan 
ascendency. The commonplace that the Bi- 
ble affords a good education, especially on 
the imaginative and moral sides, is true, and 
the theology that attaches to it has devel- 
oped strong intellects ; it was, In the end, 
the total book-culture of Bunyan, — all that 



212 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 

he knew of that vast and various world. 
But in the primary classes it is not a simple 
text-book of life, especially for a boy of ge- 
nius who is all sense, all spirit. Bunyan in 
after years did not regret his first lessons ; 
he preached that children should be taught 
the terrors of the law. Certainly his own 
mind laid hold of the easily apprehended 
images of threatened vengeance, and was 
filled with vague alarm and driven to a tor- 
turing scrutiny of his own spirit. The ex- 
perience of conversion repeats in the indi- 
vidual the religious history of the race in 
the same order in which it is developed in 
the evolution of Biblical thought itself, and 
Bunyan's case was not substantially differ- 
ent from that of others, Puritan or Catholic, 
to whom there is no Calvary without a Sinai. 
The peculiarity lay in the soil into which 
this fiery seed was sown. His imagination 
ceased its childish fabling and became vis- 
ionary; he saw, as the eye sometimes will, 
his mind-pictures, and this the more readily 
because his uneducated mind was accus- 
tomed to move through concrete ideas, and 
hence would be characterized by a high vis- 
ualizing power. That this was a marked 
trait of his mental habit is shown by the 



THREE MEN OF PIETY. 213 

fact that all liis stories about himself are 
localized in a distinctly remembered place. 

At this stage his mind approached the 
danger - line of religious madness : his de- 
scriptions of his moods, of his despairs, and 
of his struggles with fancies, whose impor- 
tance to his intellectual life arose from the 
fewness of his ideas and the limited field of 
their play, show that he had no power over 
his thoughts, that he had not learned to use 
his will in thiuking. This objectivity of his 
religious experience and his powerlessness 
before it, which have been recorded of other 
intense lives likewise, gave him a strong 
sense of the reality of spiritual things ; and 
when he at last had laid his doubts and 
come into the calm, he kept this conviction 
to such a degree that earthly matters, even 
when religion was largely interested in poli- 
tics, seemed of no consequence : this world 
was the dream, and the next world the truth. 
To our days the account of this conversion 
seems to indicate a lack of sanity, a spirit 
touched with the fever that ends in fanat- 
icism ; but we may be sure that to his hear- 
ers there was nothing incredible in it, noth- 
ing that could not be paralleled out of what 
they had known in themselves or heard from 



214 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 

their neighbors. So, early in life, the plot 
of his career was brought to its crisis. In 
this faith in the reality of eternal things 
his mind reached its growth, and afterward 
knew no change. 

But with this sure hold on the spirit and 
its high concerns there went a perfect real- 
ism. Bunyan was the opposite of a mystic. 
His common sense in his sermons of advice 
is extraordinarily close -packed and hard, 
and exhibits acute observation of the ways 
of human nature in practical life. He wrote 
once what was almost a novel, a history of 
one Mr. Badman, which is probably truer 
to contemporary life than the adventures of 
Jonathan Wild in the next century. If he 
did not weaken his eyesight over books, he 
sharpened, it on men and women. All his 
volumes abound with anecdotes and inci- 
dents which he had evidently seen in the 
town streets or by the roadside, and with 
phrases and proverbial sayings close to the 
soil. Not the least agreeable of the signs 
of this realism, this sight for the bare fact 
in sense alone, are those descriptions of the 
country, of the birds, and flowers, and fields, 
and the simple cheerfulness of them to the 
country-born boy, which strew his pages from 



THREE MEN OF PIETY. 215 

cover to cover. So, when he came to write 
his great book, he united in a perfectly nat- 
ural way, and without forethought, the real- 
ity of a journey on earth with that of the 
search for heaven. The success with which, 
in a literary work, truth is fused with fact, 
is a measure of genius. It is, perhaps, more 
striking in this case because the work is an 
allegory, which is usually so drearily pale a 
kind of composition. The characters and 
action of the Pilgrim's Progress, on the con- 
trary, are a transcript of life, so vivid that 
it cannot wear out. It is not more real- 
istic, however, than other portions of Bun- 
yan's voluminous writings, in which one 
may get an idea of English provincial char- 
acter of high historical value and human 
interest. How close, how truthful to his 
surroundings he was as a literary workman, 
is brought home with great force, though 
perhaps unconsciously, by the view which 
his biography gives of Bedford things and 
people. 

From it one may reconstruct the religious 
state of the poor people of the Lincoln dio- 
cese in Bunyan's time, and bring very near 
the look of the lowly life which was the orig- 
inal soil of English dissent and the field 



216 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 

of the tinker - preacher's labors. In read- 
ing terse extracts from the old documents — 
" short and simple annals of the poor," truly 
— of prayers in the barn and fines in the 
court-house, of levies on workmen's tools 
and old women's chattels, of these families 
of " the meanest sort," as the Bishop's sched- 
ule calls them, whose petty share of poverty 
was confiscated for the security of a Stuart 
throne and an Anglican prayer-book, — in 
reading of these things, a chapter of the his- 
tory of the English people comes out which 
has been too closely written over with the 
wit and frolic of Charles's court ; and the 
query as to what became of the Common- 
wealth when Cromwell died does not seem so 
wholly unanswerable as the silence of stand- 
ard history on the point would indicate. 

After all, one is almost inclined to say 
that no man ever owed more than Bunyan to 
his limitations. Within his bounds, he used 
all his spiritual and earthly experience, and, 
aided by a native gift of imagination and of 
fluency in the people's speech, blended them, 
and poured the full fountain of his life 
through his books. Had his youth included 
other powerful elements of emotion and 
knowledge besides his conversion, had theol- 



THREE MEN OF PIETY. 217 

ogy, or learning, or wider duties removed 
him somewhat more from the life of his 
neighbors and friends and the folk of the 
diocese, of which he was jestingly called the 
" bishop," he might have found so complete 
self-expression a more difficult task. As it 
was, he told all he had to tell, — told the 
highest truth in the commonest words and 
made it current. It is curious to observe 
that he exhibits no consciousness that he is 
writing a great work ; he speaks of a rush 
of thought and fancy, and an attractiveness 
in the subject, but he does not seem to think 
that he is doing more than adding another 
to the two-score publications he has already 
sent out. It is noticeable, too, that he did 
not meditate upon it for years beforehand, 
nor spend more than a few months in its 
composition. Some passages were added at 
a later time, but as a whole it was a spon- 
taneous and rapid composition. The reason 
is that he was ripe for it. Without know- 
ing it, he had been working up to this 
crowning book, both in thought, treatment, 
and style, through many years of sincere 
and straightforward, faee-to-face conversa- 
tion with men and women whom he was en- 
deavoring to guide in the way which ho 



218 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 

had traveled. Pilgrim's Progress has been 
called the last book that was written without 
the fear of the reviewer ; it is of more conse- 
quence that it is one of the few works that 
have been composed without ambition. 

Bunyan's memory is singularly agreeable. 
Personally he was free from the defects of 
assumption, dogmatism, and spiritual pride, 
which entered largely into the religious char- 
acter of his epoch, and his sensitive con- 
science seems to have kept him humble after 
he had won a name. The two great ele- 
ments of his work — the homely quality and 
the Christian quality — were deep-seated in 
his nature, and give him charm. In an age 
of sectaries he was not a narrow bigot, and 
did not stickle for meaningless things ; and 
in a time of political strife, growing out of 
religious differences, and though himself a 
sufferer by twelve years' imprisonment in 
early manhood, he did not confuse heaven 
with any fantastic monarchy or common- 
wealth of Christ in London, nor show any 
rancor or revengeful spirit as a subject. It 
is worth remembering that out of Puritan- 
ism, which is regarded as a narrow creed 
and life, came the only book since the Ref- 
ormation which has been acceptable to the 



THREE MEN OF PIETY. 219 

whole of Christendom, and is still regarded 
as the substantial truth of the Christian life 
in all the churches that preach it under any 
creed of orthodoxy. The life of the man 
who could evolve such a story must have 
been very simply typical of the Christian 
life itself. " A Philistine of genius " — is 
there no light nor sweetness in this ? 

II. COWPER. 

The career of Cowper, as all the world 
knows, was one to fill the pessimist with 
perennial gladness ; and, in fact, if it were 
possible to look at the natural order of 
things only as Cowper was affected thereby, 
it might seem that nothing short of malignity 
in the overruling powers could account for 
the fiat that gave up so pure, simple, and 
cordial a nature to be the prey of the seven 
devils, and rendered so many delightful 
traits of character futile to achieve the hap- 
piness of their unfortunate possessor. In his 
letters, flowing on in the old, sweet, fresh 
English, one perceives the rare literary fac- 
ulty, the shy humor, the discrimination, the 
sound sense, all the many graces of style 
and many virtues of intrinsic worth, that 
have long been familiar to scholars ; and, 



220 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 

more than that, one gladly recognizes again 
the companionable, soft-hearted, pathetic man 
whose pastimes, whether in gardening, or 
poetry, or caring for his pets, were a refuge 
from the most poignant anguish ; who played 
only to escape his terror, and at last failed 
even in that. The piety of Cowper's life, 
however, although it contributes to his poetic 
attractiveness, is only a small part of what 
must be dealt with by the observer of that 
life as it appears in his familiar letters. 
These, as a body, it is needless to say, hold 
a place from which they are not likely to be 
dislodged. Nevertheless, letters at the best 
are not a high form of literature ; even 
when, as in the present case, their workman- 
ship entitles them to rank as classics, their 
interest must finally reside in their being 
unconscious autobiography rather than in 
their artistic perfection. Hence, instead of 
regarding this correspondence as an object 
of literary virtu, it may be well for once to 
consider it with a more direct reference to 
the sober facts it chronicles and the spirit it 
reveals. 

Few persons experienced in the world 
would be likely to hold up the routine of 
Cowper's days as worthy of imitation. So 



THREE MEN OF PIETY. 221 

far as earthly matters were involved, it was 
a life of very small things ; its mundane in- 
terests were few and trivial, and sprang for 
the most part out of pursuits that belong 
usually either to the domain of childhood or 
of invalidism. This is not said disparag- 
ingly, but with due regard to the fact that 
for the larger part of his career Cowper's 
condition was such that his attention had to 
be distracted and his mind amused, as is the 
case with children or invalids. In his later 
years the composition of verses became one 
mode of such diversion, and was undertaken 
practically as a sanitary measure ; and thus 
his larger interests, involving conceptions of 
the eternal world and sympathy with his fel- 
low-men, were extended to his hours of re- 
creation. These larger interests, as they 
must be called, were from the first peculiar. 
When he was not attending to his hares or 
his vegetables, or versifying, or taking rural 
walks, he was engaged in devotional exer- 
cises of one kind or another. In 1766, for 
example, every day the time from breakfast 
until eleven o'clock was spent in reading the 
Bible or sermons, or in religious conversa- 
tion ; the hour from eleven to twelve was 
passed in church at service ; in the course of 



222 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 

the afternoon there was a second period of 
religious conversation or hymn-singing; at 
night there was commonly another sermon 
and more psalms, and after that family 
prayers. In other words, it appears that 
Cowper's life, at that time at least (and it 
is a fair sample of the whole), consisted of 
an almost monastic religious routine, re- 
lieved by the diversion of country pursuits 
on a small scale, and, later, of literary pur- 
suits in addition. At present, as has been 
said, few qualified judges would consider this 
a life of high order, either in the way of 
wisdom or utility ; but in Cowper's case, the 
peculiarity of his mental condition and the 
charm of his nature, revealed at its happy 
moments in pleasant letters, blind the reader 
to the monotony and vapidity of this exist- 
ence, for such were its characteristics, except 
in so far as the healing influences of natural 
scenes, to which Cowper was very sensitive, 
and the kindness of his household friends, 
gave it variety and substance. 

Now, it is a very striking fact that while 
Cowper spent the larger part of his time 
in religions reading and conversation, and 
besides meditated in private on the same 
themes, his letters do not show in any degree 



THBEE MEN OF PIETY. 223 

that insight into spiritual things which would 
naturally be looked for from real genius 
occupied with such subjects. Spirituality 
should have been his trait if religion was 
his life, but, in fact, these letters are in this 
regard barren. The anomalous nature of 
his poetic life — the fact that he used his 
powers, not to express his deepest emotions, 
but to escape from them — may be pleaded 
in extenuation of what seems at first a sur- 
prising defect ; but a more likely explana- 
tion lies in another direction. It was ser- 
mons that he read, theology that he talked 
about, a theory of grace and salvation that 
he meditated upon in secret ; his religion 
occupied his thoughts rather than his acts, 
touched his future rather than his present, 
— in a word, it was a system rather than a 
life, the source of doubt instead of inspira- 
tion. To put it in the simplest form, he 
derived his light, not from his own inner ex- 
perience, but from the creed. In his case 
the light was the darkness of insanity ; but 
his own conviction in the matter is shown 
in his characterization of Beattie, — u a man 
whose faculties have now and then a glimpse 
from Heaven upon them, a man not indeed 
in possession of much evangelical light, but 



224 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 

faithful to what he has, and never neglect- 
ing an opportunity to use it." A poet who 
identifies " evangelical light " with " the vis- 
ion and the faculty divine " may write The 
Castaway, but one is not likely to find in 
his works those intimate revelations of truth 
that flash in convincing beauty from the 
lines of the true spiritualists, such as Words- 
worth, Shelley, or Emerson. Cowper's mis- 
fortune, both as a man and a poet, was this 
substitution of dogma for instinct, which, 
operating in so sensitive and feeble a nature, 
made religion, which was his vital interest, 
not a life but a disease, and gave to the 
activities of his higher powers the character 
of mania. It is misleading, therefore, to 
think of these letters as the fruit of a deeply 
religious mind ; they are the record of the 
efforts of a creed-believing mind to get rid 
of itself, and their virtues — their amiability, 
their delight in small adventures, their in- 
terest in literature and humanity — exist not 
in consequence of but in spite of the reli- 
gious bent of their author. 

Cowper was deficient, too, aesthetically as 
well as spiritually, and the character of his 
limitations was much the same in both re- 
spects. His sense of beauty was practically 



THREE MEN OF PIETY, 225 

confined to landscape and small animals. 
The cramping influences amid which he 
lived are well indicated by his remarks upon 
a clergyman who, it should be said, richly 
deserved censure : — 

"He seems, together with others of our 
acquaintance, to have suffered considerably 
in his spiritual character by his attachment 
to music. The lawfulness of it, when used 
with moderation, and in its proper place, is 
unquestionable ; but I believe that wine it- 
self, though a man be guilty of habitual in- 
toxication, does not more debauch and befool 
the natural understanding than music — al- 
ways music, music in season and out of sea- 
son — weakens and destroys the spiritual 
discernment. If it is not used with an un- 
feigned reference to the worship of God, 
and with a design to assist the soul in the 
performance of it, which cannot be the case 
when it is the only occupation, it degener- 
ates into a sensual delight, and becomes a 
most powerful advocate for the admission of 
other pleasures, grosser, perhaps, in degree, 
but in their kind the same." 

Whatever truth there may be in this es- 
timate of the influence of music, the limita- 
tion of its use to church choirs and organs 



226 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 

is an expression of Puritan iconoclasm which 
acquaints the reader at once with Cowper's 
provincialism. The passage is English to 
the core, and not only does it suggest the 
aesthetic deficiencies of the poet and his life, 
but it also brings up once more the charac- 
teristic English picture of the family sing- 
ing psalms and reading sermons, year in, 
year out, with which the letters begin. This 
correspondence has made that group of in- 
terest to the world; but in answer to the 
question, What was its life and its spirit, 
can one help feeling that trivial, not to 
say belittling, occupations, and a narrowing 
theology, were principal elements ? Cow- 
per's work, in the main, has only the slug- 
gish vitality of this life ; in his letters more 
than in his verses, speaking generally, there 
is literary grace and personal charm ; but in 
both they seem a sort of salvage. A vision 
of quiet green fields, inhabited by respec- 
table gentlefolk who led an existence of 
humble routine in a neighborly way, made 
up Cowper's world ; he lived in it over- 
shadowed by the ever present fear of dam- 
nation, and at last, sunk in despair, he died 
in it. Out of such a world no great poet 
either of the soul or of nature could come. 



THREE MEN OF PIETY. 227 

Cowper's virtue was in his simplicity and 
genuineness, rare qualities then ; his good 
fortune was in never belonging to the liter- 
ary set or bowing to the town taste ; hence 
in a time the most barren in English litera- 
ture, he gave us a half dozen fine poems that 
stand far beyond all contemporary rivalry, 
and some private letters of the best style 
and temper. When, however, the question 
comes as to the intrinsic value of these let- 
ters, it must be confessed that though they 
please the taste they do not interest the mind 
except in a curious and diverting way. They 
are less the letters of a poet than of a village 
original, a sort of schoolmaster or clergyman 
manqiie, of sound sense, tender heart, and 
humane perception, but the creature of a 
narrow sphere. 

III. CHANNING. 

Channing was the chief ornament of the 
American pulpit in his day. Like nearly 
all men illustrious in the religious life, he 
has won a kindlier and wider regard by his 
character than by his opinions, because the 
moods of devotion are simple and are uni- 
versal in human nature, while opinion in 
theology is more variable and eccentric, and 



228 THBEE MEN OF PIETY. 

in some degree more accidental, than in any- 
other branch of speculation. The deepest 
interest of his life lies not so mucn in the 
fruit of his genius as in the light of his 
spirit. Indeed, this acknowledgment is 
wrapped up in the indiscriminate eulogy by 
which his admirers have injured his fame, 
for they have presented him as a saint rather 
than as a thinker, as an example of ideal 
living rather than as a finder of truth. To 
put a man in the catalogue of saints is 
merely to write his epitaph ; his life is the 
main thing, and Channing, although his 
biography records no great deeds in the 
world and no great crises of inner expe- 
rience, is not alone in being far more inter- 
esting in his humanity than in his canoniza- 
tion. A refined and sensitive childhood, 
shadowed in some partially explained way, 
so that he never remembered it as a period 
of joyfulness, was followed by a spirited and 
dreaming youth, caught by the fervors of 
French revolutionary ideas and exalted by 
its own noble motives. In those early years, 
as well as in his late maturity, he expe- 
rienced, on the beach at Newport and under 
the willows at Cambridge, moments of in, 
sight and impulse which stood out ever after 



THREE MEN OF PIETY. 229 

in his memory as new births of the spirit 
prophetic of the future. His career was es- 
pecially determined, however, by the twenty- 
one months which he passed at Richmond 
as a private tutor, immediately after leaving 
college. There, in loneliness and poverty, 
in stoical disregard of health and courting 
privation, in Christian conscientiousness of 
motive, led on by glowing reveries in which 
visionary objects seemed realities within 
reach, he devoted himself in written words 
to the service of mankind by the instrumen- 
talities of religion. It is painful to read the 
narrative of this intense personal life in the 
years most susceptible to enthusiasm for re- 
mote and ideal ends ; there can be no won- 
der that after such experience he returned 
home with the seal of the religious life set 
upon his soul, and with a body inexorably 
condemned to life-long disease. He entered 
upon his ministry in the field where he could 
best do good and find peace in doing it; 
morally the child of the New England re- 
ligious spirit, and intellectually the disciple 
of those ideas of the nature of humanity and 
the right course of its development which 
the French Revolution had disseminated. 
Throughout his life he was governed mainly 



230 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 

by a deep sense of the dignity of manhood, 
under whatever form, and by an abiding 
conviction of the aid which Christianity 
gives to the imagination and heart in obey- 
ing the rule of love and obtaining perma- 
nent peace of mind. 

The most acute criticism ever passed upon 
Channing's character was by that unnamed 
critic who said, " He was kept from the 
highest goodness by his love of rectitude." 
The love of rectitude was his predominant 
trait ; he was enslaved by it. He exacted 
more of himself, however, than of others. 
Right he must be, at all hazards, in motive, 
opinion, and action. It is melancholy to 
read page after page of his self-examination, 
so minute, intricate, and painful, so fre- 
quent and long continued. It almost awak- 
ens a doubt of the value of noble character 
to find it so unsure of itself, to see its pos- 
sessor so absorbed in hunting his own shadow 
within the innermost retreats of thought and 
feeling. Channing seems to have preached 
more sermons to himself than to the world. 
His love of rectitude led him to this exces- 
sive conscientiousness, but it brought him 
great good in other directions. It gave him 
a respect for the opinions of other men as 



THBEE MEN OF PIETY. 231 

catholic as it was humble. He did not 
practice toleration toward them, for that ex- 
pression implied to his mind a misjiLaced 
self-confidence ; but he practiced charity, as 
toward men who felt equally with himself 
the binding force of the obligation to be 
right, and who had an equal chance of find- 
ing truth. His conviction of the universal- 
ity of this obligation and his perception 
that it necessitates the independent exercise 
of individual powers encouraged in him a 
remarkable admiration for individuality, for 
the unhampered exercise of thought and un- 
questioned obedience to motive in which the 
richness of individual life consists. 

His second great quality, as pervasive and 
controlling as his desire to be right, was 
sensibility. It was revealed in the sym- 
pathies and affections of private life, which 
are known to the world only by the report 
of friends ; but it may be seen with equal 
clearness in the intensity of his delight in 
nature, and in the ardent feeling by which 
he realized ideal ends and gave them a liv- 
ing presence in his own life as objects of 
continuous effort. His sensitiveness to nat- 
ural beauty was so keen that in moments of 
physical weakness it caused pain. "There 



232 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 

are times," he wrote, " when I have been so 
feeble that a glance at the natural land- 
scape, or even the sight of a beautiful flower, 
gave me a bodily pain from which I shrank." 
As life drew on to its end, the indestructible 
loveliness of nature became to him a source 
of joy and peace ever more prized. " The 
world grows younger with age ! " he ex- 
claimed more than once. In emotional sus- 
ceptibility to ideas he resembled Shelley, 
and probably it was this likeness of feeling 
which led him to call Shelley, in ministerial 
language, but with extraordinary charity for 
that age, " a seraph gone astray." He re- 
tained through life the intellectual sympa- 
thies of his youth, and in his last days still 
had an inclination toward community of 
property as the solution of the social prob- 
lem ; like "Wordsworth and Southey he re- 
coiled from the excesses of the French, but 
he never gave up the tricolor for the white 
cockade. In his generation nearly all men 
were hopeful of the accomplishment of be- 
neficent reforms ; but Channing was filled 
with an enthusiasm of hope which was al- 
most the fervor of conviction. He was 
without that practical enthusiasm which is 
aroused by the presence of great deeds im- 



THREE MEN OF PIETY. 233 

mediately to be done ; the objects for which 
he worked were far in the distance, scarcely 
discernible except from the mount of vision ; 
but he was possessed by the enthusiasm 
which is kindled by the heat of thought 
and is wrapped in its own solitary flames, 
and he lived under the bright zenith of 
that mood of which Carlyle has shown the 
dark nadir and Teufelsdroch standing in its 
shadow gazing out over the sleeping city. 
These three principles — rectitude, sensibil- 
ity, enthusiasm — were elemental in Chan- 
ning's nature ; and because they are moral, 
and not intellectual, he lived a spiritual 
rather than a mental life; he gained in 
depth rather than in breadth, and worked 
out his development by contemplation and 
prayer rather than by thought and act. 

It appears strange, at first, that a man 
with these endowments should have been 
so conservative in opinion, and so little in- 
clined to force upon the world what ad- 
vanced opinions he did hold. A lover of 
truth unwilling to make proselytes, an en- 
thusiast unwilling to act, seems an anom- 
aly ; but such was Channing's position. One 
cause of his aversion to pushing Unitarian- 
ism to its conclusion is found in the history 



234 THBEE MEN OF PIETY. 

of his own conversion and in the character 
of his attachment to the new faith ; he was 
a revolter of the heart ; he was liberalized 
by his feelings. " My inquiries," he said, 
" grew out of the shock given to my moral 
nature by the popular system of faith." 
He was moved by sentiment in his rejec- 
tion of Calvinism, and he was kept by 
sentiment from giving up the theory of the 
mysterious character and mission of Christ. 
The strength of his feelings operated to 
render him conservative, and the low es- 
timate he apparently placed upon logical 
processes contributed to the same end. " It 
is a good plan," he wrote, " ever and anon 
to make a clean sweep of that to which we 
have arrived by logical thought, and take a 
new view ; for the mind needs the baptism 
of wonder and hope to keep it vigorous and 
healthy for intuition." Either this distrust 
of the understanding working by logical 
processes, or else a native inaptitude for 
theological reasoning, prevented him from 
following out his principles to their conclu- 
sion. If he had framed a system, he would 
have held his views with greater certainty ; 
as it was, he not only allowed the greatest 
liberty to individual opinion, but he dis- 



THREE MEN OF PIETY. 235 

trusted himself. " You young thinkers," he 
said, " have the advantage of us in coming 
without superstitious preoccupation to the 
words of Scripture, and are more likely to 
get the obvious meaning. We shall walk in 
shadows to our graves." The strength of in- 
bred sentiment could not be overpowered by 
such feeble intellectual conviction. He was a 
moral, not an intellectual, reformer ; his work 
was not the destruction of a theology, but the 
spread of charity. He felt more than he rea- 
soned, and hence his rationalism was bounded, 
not by the unknown, but by the mystical. He 
was satisfied with this, and does not seem to 
have wished to make a definite statement of 
his beliefs. The whole matter is summed 
up by Miss Peabody when she says, " The 
Christianity which Dr. Channing believed 
. . . was a spirit, not a form of thought." 
A spirit of devotion toward the divine, a 
spirit of love toward the human, Channing 
preached to the world and illustrated by his 
life ; but a new form of thought which shows 
the intellectual advance that alone is fatal 
to conservatism, — this was no part of his 
gift to men. 

In the antislavery cause his conservatism 
appears in a less pleasing light. Here he 



236 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 

exhibited the scholar's reluctance to initiate 
reform, the scholar's perplexity before the 
practical barriers in the way of action. He 
was displeased by the rude voices about him, 
and frightened by the violence of determi- 
nation which the reformers displayed. He 
looked to find the peace of the pulpit in the 
arena, and was bewildered by the alarms of 
the active strife. He did not choose his side 
until the last moment, and even then he de- 
layed until he called down the just rebuke of 
May and the just defense that reformer made 
for his comrades : " The children of Abra- 
ham held their peace until at last the very 
stones have cried out, and you must expect 
them to cry out like the stones." Then, in- 
deed, Channing showed that he was a Falk- 
land on Cromwell's side, not acting without 
a doubt, but taking his place, nevertheless, 
openly and manfully beside the friend whom 
he had left alone too long. Yet he never lost, 
even in that stirring cause, the timidity of 
culture. He was of the generation of those 
cultivated men who earned for Boston the 
reputation for intellectual preeminence ; but 
the political future of the country did not 
belong to him nor to his companions ; it be- 
longed to Garrison and Lincoln. Here it 



THREE MEN OF PIETY. 237 

is that Father Taylor's keen criticism strikes 
home : " What a beautiful being Dr. Chan- 
ning is ! If he only had had any educa- 
tion ! " Channing's education had been of 
the lamp, and not of the sword ; it seemed 
to Father Taylor pitifully narrow and palsy- 
stricken beside his own experience of the 
world's misery. Channing's life affords one 
more illustration of the difficulty the culti- 
vated man finds in understanding and for- 
warding reform in its beginning; but he 
deserves the credit of having rid himself of 
the prejudices and influences that marked 
the society in which he moved, to a greater 
degree, perhaps, than any other of his circle. 
The value of Channing's work in religion 
and in reform will be differently rated by 
men, for his service was of a kind which is 
too apt to be forgotten. The intrinsic worth 
of his writings remains to be tested by time ; 
but their historic worth, as a means of lib- 
eralizing the New England of his day, was 
great and memorable. He gave his right 
hand to Emerson and his left hand to Par- 
ker ; and, although he could not accompany 
them on the way, he bade them Godspeed. 
It was, perhaps, mainly through his influ- 
ence that they found the field prepared for 



238 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 

them and the harvest ready, although he 
would not put his sickle in. It was largely 
due to him, also, that Boston became the 
philanthropic centre of the country. Dur- 
ing his lifetime he won a remarkable respect 
and admiration. An exaggerated estimate 
of his eloquence, powers, and influence will 
continue to be held so long as any remain 
alive who heard his voice and remember its 
accents; in later times a truer judgment 
may be reached. Personally he was amia- 
ble, kindly, and courteous, notwithstanding 
the distance at which he seems to have kept 
all men. Dr. Walker said that conversa- 
tion was always constrained in his study. 
In his nephew's narrative, it is said that the 
interview with him was " solemn as the visit 
to the shrine of an oracle." He himself 
told Miss Peabody after their friendship 
had lasted several years, that she had " the 
awe of the preacher " upon her. Finally, 
we read that no man ever freely laid his 
hand upon Channing's shoulder; and we won- 
der whether he ever remembered that St. 
John had " handled the Word made flesh." 
This self-seclusion, this isolation of sanctity, 
as it were, did not proceed from any value 
he set upon himself above his fellows ; it 



THREE MEN OF PIETY. 239 

was the natural failing of a man who lived 
much within himself, and who always medi- 
tated the loftiest of unworldly themes. He 
was a faithful and well-beloved friend ; and 
if in this, as in other directions, he " failed 
of the highest goodness," there are few in 
the same walk of life who attain to equal 
sincerity, charity, and purity, or equal ser- 
viceableness to the world. 



DARWIN'S LIFE. 

There is nothing more useful to observe 
in the life of Darwin than its simplicity. He 
was the man of science as Marlborough was 
the soldier, and he was only that. From 
boyhood he refused all other ways of life 
and knowledge as by instinct, and in his 
maturity the ill health which ends the career 
of ordinary men only confirmed him in his 
own ; he was always the collector, the inves- 
tigator, or the theorizer. A second quality, 
which is general enough to be constantly at- 
tracting attention, is the thoroughly English 
character of his life. The stock from which 
he sprang was rich in old English qualities 
of vigor, sense, and originality; the house 
in which he was reared offers an excellent 
type of English family life, and was as good 
a place to be born in as could be desired for 
any son; his father's strong character, the 
influences of his older relatives, the ordinary 
schools he attended, the smallest incidents 
of his childhood, even the jokes of his play- 



DARWIN'S LIFE. 241 

fellows, belong to the nioral climate of the 
old country ; and it does not need the grouse- 
shooting, the Cambridge undergraduate sup- 
pers, and the proposition that he should 
choose the Church for a profession to tell us 
where we are. Indeed, Darwin in his youth, 
spirited, cordial, and overflowing with health, 
in his early surroundings of English strength 
and kindness, was quite as attractive as in 
his quieter, and in some respects narrower, 
working life. 

He certainly won upon the men whom he 
met at the outset of his career. " Looking 
back," he says, " I infer that there must 
have been something in me a little superior 
to the common run of youths : otherwise the 
above-mentioned men, so much older than 
me and higher in academical position, would 
never have allowed me to associate with 
them. Certainly I was not aware of any 
such superiority; and I remember one of 
my sporting friends, Turner, who saw me at 
work with my beetles, saying that I should 
some day be a Fellow of the Royal Society, 
and the notion seemed to me preposterous." 
Of these men Henslow was the most at- 
tached to him and interested in his success. 
He had not done much more than work at 



242 DARWIN'S LIFE. 

" his beetles," but his scientific taste was al- 
ready the ruling genius of his life. It is 
surprising to see how completely he remained 
untouched by the ordinary influences of a 
university training ; he thought in later 
years that his scholastic education had been 
a waste of time, and he seems justified when 
one perceives how little good he got from 
it. His was a mind that belonged to him- 
self, self-fed, almost self-made ; he lived his 
own life, and not another's, from the start ; 
though his taste for collecting was heredi- 
tary, the persistence with which he gave 
himself up to following it, the completeness 
of his surrender to his one predominant tal- 
ent, was his own. He was, nevertheless, 
better furnished with intellectual power than 
he appears to have believed. " From my 
earliest youth," he writes, " I have had the 
strongest desire to understand or explain 
whatever I observed, that is, to group all 
facts under some general laws." It is true 
that he started from some specific facts, had 
a definite, tangible problem to solve ; but he 
felt the necessity to solve it. He differed 
from the collector in this, that his curiosity 
was not exhausted in gathering materials, 
but he must also order his materials ; or to 



DARWIN'S LIFE. 243 

put it exactly, must organize Lis knowledge. 
This shows the great vitality of his reason- 
ing faculty, which within its special range 
was really precocious. The native strength 
of his mind in this direction is also illus- 
trated by the great pleasure he derived from 
reading Paley's Evidences. " The logic of 
this book," he declares, " and, as I may add, 
of his Natural Theology, gave me as much 
delight as did Euclid. The careful study 
of these works, without attempting to learn 
any part by rote, was the only part of the 
academical course which, as I then felt and 
as I still believe, was of the least use to me 
in the education of my mind. I did not 
at that time trouble myself about Paley's 
premises ; and taking these in trust, I was 
charmed and convinced by the long line of 
argumentation." He acknowledges his in- 
ability in later life to follow trains of ab- 
stract reasoning, such as make the matter of 
metaphysics ; but he was quite aware of his 
aptitude for inductive reasoning, and does 
not overestimate its influence in the com- 
position of his great work. " Some of my 
critics have said, ' Oh, he is a good observer, 
but he has no power of reasoning ! ' I do 
not think that this can be true, for the Ori- 



244 DAB WIN'S LIFE. 

gin of Species is one long argument from 
the beginning to the end, and it has con- 
vinced not a few able men." His taste for 
collecting was a sine qua non, but it was 
this power of reasoning, however limited in 
range, that made him great ; and it is as 
clearly to be seen in operation in his forma- 
tive years as was the passion for collecting 
which was to feed it with material to work 
upon. His vivacity and energy no doubt 
counted much in winning for him the friend- 
ship of elder men, and he possessed that in- 
definable but potent quality of personal at- 
tractiveness ; but Henslow in the beginning, 
as Lyell later, must have seen in him that 
happy conjunction of tastes and faculties 
which made his genius for science, or at 
least they must have perceived the promise 
of it. 

All the circumstances of his life seem to 
have conspired to favor this special endow- 
ment. The very fact that the classics did 
nothing for him helped him : he was relieved 
from the confusion caused by complex and 
disturbing elements in a varied education ; 
he had no difficulty in making his choice ; 
he was not afterward drawn aside by the 
existence of other unsatisfied tastes, artifi- 



DAB WIN'S LIFE. 245 

cially cultivated ; he had no ambition for 
that roundness of development which is a 
fetich of modern times; he did not fritter 
away his time and energy in directions in 
which he could not excel. It is not meant 
to hold up his luck in this respect as exem- 
plary good fortune, but only to emphasize 
the way in which it told on his success. He 
was not less happy in the exterior circum- 
stances of his life, and in those things which 
come by a kind of hazard. His appoint- 
ment to the Beagle was a Napoleonic oppor- 
tunity, and in looking back he realized its 
value to the full : " The voyage of the Bea- 
gle has been by far the most important 
event in my life, and has determined my 
whole career; yet it depended on so small 
a circumstance as my uncle offering to drive 
me thirty miles to Shrewsbury, which few 
uncles would have done, and on such a trifle 
as the shape of my nose." But one ought 
not to exaggerate the element of chance ; 
and though Captain Fitz-roy had continued 
to disapprove of Darwin's nose, and his un- 
cle had not interfered to overcome the elder 
Darwin's objection to the voyage on the 
score that it would be an unbecoming ad- 
venture for a prospective clergyman, and on 



246 DABWIN'S LIFE. 

other equally good or better grounds, yet we 
might have had our great naturalist. The 
voyage of the Beagle, nevertheless, was the 
turning-point of Darwin's life. He obtained 
in the course of it the first real training of 
his mind ; it brought before him several de- 
partments of science in such a way that he 
approached them with active and original 
thoughts, and was constantly forced into an 
inquiring and bold attitude toward the novel 
material he found; it gave him five years 
alone with science, and free from any near 
master to whom he might have formed the 
habit of deferring. Huxley does not over- 
state the material advantages that this train- 
ing brought with it : " In Physical Geogra- 
phy, in Geology proper, in Geographical 
Distribution, and in Palaeontology, he had 
acquired an extensive practical training dur- 
ing the voyage of the Beagle. He knew of 
his own knowledge the way in which the 
raw materials of these branches of science 
are acquired, and was therefore a most com- 
petent judge of the speculative strain they 
would bear. That which he needed, after 
his return to England, was a corresponding 
acquaintance with Anatomy and develop- 
ment, and their relations to Taxonomy, and 



DAB WIN'S LIFE. 247 

he acquired this by his Cirripede work." It 
is to be noticed that during his voyage in 
the Beagle he became convinced of the 
"wonderful superiority of Lyell's manner 
of treating geology" over every other au- 
thor's. This is an illustration, like that 
drawn from Paley, of the character of his 
mind as primarily a reasoning mind; for 
what he recognized in Lyell was a method. 
It was on this voyage, too, that he became 
ambitious ; he began to believe that he might 
add to the stock of human knowledge, and 
the stimulation of the welcome his success 
was meeting in England was evidently 
keenly felt. He put his whole heart into 
the work, and few passages are more stir- 
ring than those which describe his zeal in 
his first really scientific enthusiasm, after 
he had given up his gun as of less use than 
his eye, and had found sport, even with his 
fond love of it, an inferior pleasure to the 
pursuit of knowledge ; then, alone in the 
Andes and the Southern Ocean, he came to 
his majority. 

Mr. Huxley, in the passage cited, has 
noted the need Darwin had for further 
training, particularly as a naturalist. He 
obtained this by his work on the Cirripedes, 



248 DARWIN'S LIFE. 

an eight years' labor. This concluded his 
education. Of the value of it merely as 
training and to himself, Sir Joseph Hooker 
says : " Your father recognized three stages 
in his career as a biologist : the mere col- 
lector at Cambridge ; the collector and ob- 
server in the Beagle, and for some years 
afterwards ; and the trained naturalist after, 
and only after, the Cirripede work. That 
he was a thinker all along is true enough." 
Huxley says that Darwin never did a wiser 
thing than when he devoted himself to these 
years of patient toil. Darwin himself does 
not indicate that he purposely chose to do 
this monograph in order to educate himself, 
and he doubts whether it was worth the 
time. He seems to have been gradually 
drawn into it, and to have finished it be- 
cause he had gone so far. When he had 
done with it, at any rate, if not before, he 
was a thoroughly furnished man for such in- 
vestigation as was to be his title to lasting 
fame. He had come to be thus equipped 
by the mere course of his life ; by beetles 
at Cambridge, and the Beagle, and the Cir- 
ripedes. Yet if he had planned his educa- 
tion from the start for the express purpose 
of dealing in the most masterly way with 



DARWIN'S LIFE. 249 

the mass of diversified details out of which 
the Origin of Species and the other deriva- 
tive coordinate works grew, it is hard to see 
in what way his course could have been 
improved. The ill-health which seized him 
so soon was almost a blessing in disguise, 
since it isolated him from the distractions 
of modern London, made him value his life 
and his time, and possibly, by the economy 
of his strength which it necessitated, aided 
as much as it hindered him. 

One need not follow him through the 
composition of his books, or even through 
the elaboration of the theory of natural se- 
lection, during the many years that it was 
growing in his laboratory of notes. For 
him the formulating of that theory was in- 
evitable : it seems, as one observes him, nat- 
ural enough to have been foretold of him ; 
but it followed, not from his position, which 
another man might have occupied, but from 
his genius. The qualities of mind which it 
required were not many, and one under- 
stands readily why it is so commonly said 
that all is explained by his power of obser- 
vation and its vast range ; but it did require 
one high faculty of the mind, and a rare 
one, which Darwin had preeminently among 



250 DAB WIN'S LIFE. 

the men of his time, — the faculty, namely, 
of discerning the lines of inquiry in a mass 
of as yet unrelated facts. He somewhere 
says that he had found it harder, perhaps, 
to put the question than it was to reach the 
answer. This power is the great economizer 
of mental energy, in any branch of investi- 
gation ; it is, to the man who has it, equiv- 
alent to a compass; and to Darwin it was 
the one talent without which his stores of 
knowledge would have been no more than a 
heap of unclassified specimens in a museum 
cellar. Moral and physical qualities he had, 
besides ; his patience and his practiced vis- 
ion were invaluable ; but it was the intel- 
lectual part that penetrated the secrets of 
nature. This sense of the problem, this eye 
for the question, was most serviceable to his 
success. His acuteness in perceiving the 
importance of the infinitely little, which is 
often mentioned as one of his distinguishing 
traits, was only an incident of this larger 
endowment ; and his power to make other 
men useful to him, specialists in horticulture 
or physiology, or even common observing 
men, was only the knowledge of how to put 
practical questions. The point is worth em- 
phasizing, because in this age of the accu- 



DAB WIN'S LIFE. 251 

mulation of scientific detail it is too apt to 
be forgotten that the thinking mind is as 
rare in science as in other departments, 
and is, nevertheless, the indispensable thing 
which makes a man great. 

Here it is worth while to advert to that 
persistent discussion respecting the nature 
of a modern education, which Darwin's ex- 
perience is bound to bring forward with 
renewed vigor. His testimony, both in the 
chart of himself which he gave Mr. Galton 
and in the account he wrote for his children, 
is unequivocal. He says he was self-taught ; 
that his training at the university was of no 
use to him, speaking generally ; and that the 
classics in particular were barren. He seems 
to be quite correct in his statement ; the 
claim that his powers of observation and 
comparison were really developed by school- 
boy attention to Latin and Greek termina- 
tions is purely pedagogical ; nor is there any 
reason to question that men of genius can 
be successful, achieve eminent greatness for 
themselves, and do work of the highest value 
to society without immediate obligation to 
those studies usually called the humanities. 
This is nothing new. Instances of self -edu- 
cation for special careers are to be found in 



252 DAB WIN'S LIFE. 

other walks than those of science : in war, 
in administration, and generally in active 
life, and not infrequently in literature itself. 
But it is worth observing what testimony 
these volumes bear to the wonderful vital- 
ity of the Greek intelligence. Speaking of 
the theory of Pangenesis, Darwin writes to 
a correspondent that the views of Hippoc- 
rates " seem almost identical with mine, — 
merely a change of terms, and an applica- 
tion of them to classes of facts necessarily 
unknown to the old philosopher." Again, 
he writes of Aristotle : " From quotations 
which I had seen I had a high notion of 
Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most 
remote notion what a wonderful man he 
was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my 
two gods, though in very different ways, but 
they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle. 
... I never realized, before reading your 
book, to what an enormous consummation 
of labor we owe even our common know- 
ledge." A more striking passage is that of 
Huxley's, where he says : "The oldest of all 
philosophies, that of evolution, was bound 
hand and foot and cast into utter darkness 
during the millennium of theological scho- 
lasticism. But Darwin poured new life- 



DAB WIN'S LIFE. 253 

blood into the ancient frame; the bonds 
burst, and the revivified thought of ancient 
Greece has proved itself to be a more ade- 
quate expression of the universal order of 
things than anv of the schemes which have 
been accepted by the credulity and welcomed 
by the superstition of seventy later genera- 
tions of men." Rediscovery, however, is 
not obligation ; and, perhaps, if Darwin had 
been thoroughly imbued with the Greek 
mode of looking upon the universe, he would 
not have been really indebted to it for his 
own views; for he went upon different 
grounds in forming his conceptions. The 
real question is, not whether Darwin suc- 
ceeded without Greek influences, but whether 
he lost anything because of his failure to 
assimilate them. The answer seems plain. 
It is written all over these pages, and is ex- 
pressly given by Darwin in more than one 
passage. 

No words can be too strong to express the 
lovableness of Darwin's personality, or the 
moral beauty of his character. In his biog- 
raphy, it is true, he is presented as the man 
of science ; but he is seen occasionally in 
other aspects. He was a dutiful, respect- 
ful, and affectionate son, at the outset of his 



254 DAB WIN'S LIFE. 

life. He thought his father was sometimes 
unjust, but he always spoke of him as " the 
wisest man he ever knew ; " and there is a 
touching passage in one of his letters home, 
when his father had sent him a note : " I al- 
most cried for pleasure at receiving it ; it 
was very kind, thinking of writing to me." 
He was also, in his turn, an admirable fa- 
ther, considerate, patient, and very tender. 
One of his sons tells a most significant anec- 
dote of once having drawn on himself some 
indignant exclamation, " almost with fury," 
and the end of it being that " next morning, 
at seven o'clock or so, he came into my bed- 
room and sat on my bed, and said he had 
not been able to sleep, from the thought that 
he had been so angry with me, and after 
a few more kind words he left me." His 
description of his little daughter who died is 
of itself enough to show the extraordinarily 
fine quality of his affections ; and in general 
his relations with his children are almost 
ideal in gentleness, kindness, and compan- 
ionableness. He was also a good friend 
and acquaintance. In a word, in his private 
social relations he was exemplary, judged 
by the standard of a high civilization. He 
was not without a sense, too, of public duty. 



DARWIN'S LIFE. 255 

He felt strongly only upon the subject of 
slavery, and this was largely because of his 
travels in slave countries. He was inter- 
ested in philanthropic efforts to some de- 
gree, and especially in furthering the in- 
crease of kindness to animals. But he was 
remote from public affairs, and led even in 
his sympathies a life somewhat narrowly 
confined to his own circle and his work in 
science. In other parts of his character 
there is nothing to displease. He was mod- 
est and just, and free from envy, conscien- 
tious to an extreme, and as ready to give as 
to receive help in all ways. He was more 
pleased with his fame than he acknow- 
ledged; he cared deeply for the success of 
his theory, and was well aware of its in- 
fluence on his own reputation as one to be 
classed with Newton's ; he liked praise and 
distinction, though he limited his desire to 
the commendation and respect of natural- 
ists ; but this is only to wish to be approved 
by the most competent judges. He was fair 
to Wallace, and exhibited the best of tem- 
pers toward him ; but between the lines one 
reads that he was nettled and annoyed by 
the incident, and it must be concluded that 
as he was ambitious in youth, he was de* 



256 BAB WIN'S LIFE. 

sirous of having his due in manhood, and 
valued fame. 

This was a character which might well 
spare the humanities. The fact remains that 
he did spare them. What he lost was cul- 
ture. The confession that he makes of the 
gradual atrophy of his aesthetic tastes will 
be long quoted as one of the most remark- 
able facts of his life. He began with a sus- 
ceptibility to music, which by his son's ac- 
count he did not lose; with a liking for 
poetry, such that he read The Excursion 
twice, and he would not have read it except 
for pleasure; and he used to take Milton 
with him in his pocket. In art he went 
but a little way, if, indeed, he ever really 
had any eye for it. He was religious, as an 
English boy usually is ; but his interest in 
belief regarding religious subjects died out, 
and, what is of more consequence, the emo- 
tions which were called out by it in early 
life ceased to be exercised. There was a 
deadening, in other words, of all his nat- 
ure, except so far as it was fed by his work, 
his family, and his friends in its intellect- 
ual and social parts. So complete was this 
change that it affected even his appreciation 
of beautiful scenery, which had evidently 



DABWIN'S LIFE. 257 

given him keen delight in his youth and 
travels. He dates this change from just 
after his thirtieth year, when he became ab- 
sorbed in scientific pursuits as his profession. 
Something, no doubt, and perhaps much, is 
to be set down to the effect of his ill-health, 
which left him with diminished energies for 
any recreation ; his strength was exhausted 
in his few hours of work. He was himself 
so convinced that his life had been narrowed 
in these ways, that he says ' if he had it to 
live over he would have planned to give a 
certain time habitually to poetry. 

It would be too much to say that the fail- 
ure of Darwin to appropriate the humane 
elements in his university education accounts 
in any perceptible degree for these defects. 
In culture, as in science, the self-making 
power of the man counts heavily ; and there 
is such inefficiency in those whose duty it is 
to give youth a liberal education from clas- 
sical sources, there are such wrong methods 
and unintelligent aims in the universities, 
that it might easily prove to be the case that 
a student with the most cordial tempera- 
ment toward the humanities would profit 
only imperfectly by his residence at seats of 
learning. In spite of these reservations 



258 DAB WIN'S LIFE. 

however, the Greek culture is the historical 
source of what are traditionally the higher 
elements in our intellectual life, and has 
been for most cultivated men the practical 
discipline of their minds. But it is to be 
further observed that the example of Dar- 
win, if it should be set up as showing that 
Greek culture is unnecessaiy in modern 
days, goes just as directly and completely to 
prove that all literary education, as well by 
modern as by ancient authors, is superfluous. 
It is enough to indicate to what a length the 
argument must be carried, if it is at all ad- 
mitted. The important matter is rather the 
question, How much was Darwin's life in- 
jured for himself by his loss of culture, in 
the fact that some of those sources of intel- 
lectual delight which are reputed the most 
precious for civilized man were closed to 
him? 

The blank page in this charming biogra- 
phy is the page of spiritual life. There is 
-nothing written there. The entire absence 
of an element which enters commonly into 
all men's lives in some degree is a circum- 
stance as significant as it is astonishing. 
Never was a man more alive to what is 
visible and tangible, or in any way matter of 



DAB WIN'S LIFE. 259 

sensation ; on the sides of his nature where 
an appeal could be made, never was a man 
more responsive ; but there were parts in 
which he was blind and dull. Just as the 
boy failed to be interested in many things, 
the man failed too ; and he disregarded 
what did not interest him with the same 
ease at sixty as at twenty. What did in- 
terest him was the immediately present, and 
he dealt with it admirably, both in the in- 
tellectual and the moral world ; but what 
was remote was as if it were not. The spir- 
itual element in life is not remote, but it is 
not matter of sensation, and Darwin lived as 
if there were no such thing ; it belongs to the 
region of emotion and imagination, and those 
perceptions which deal with the nature of 
man in its contrast with the material world. 
Poetry, art, music, the emotional influences 
of nature, the idealizations of moral life, are 
the means by which men take possession of 
this inner world of man ; to which, for man 
at least, nature in all its immensity is sub- 
sidiary. Darwin's insensibility to the higher 
life — for so men agree to call it — was 
partly, if not wholly, induced by his absorp- 
tion in scientific pursuits in the spirit of ma- 
terialism. We praise him for his achieve- 



260 DARWIN'S LIFE. 

ments, we admire his character, and we feel 
the full charm of his temperament ; he de- 
lights us in every active manifestation of his 
nature. We do not now learn for the first 
time that a man may be good without being 
religious, and successful without being liber- 
ally educated, and worthy of honor without 
being spiritual ; but a man may be all this 
and yet be incomplete. Great as Darwin 
was as a thinker, and winning as he remains 
as a man, those elements in which he was 
deficient are the noblest part of our nature. 



BYKON'S CENTENAKY. 

The absence of any widespread interest 
in the centenary of Lord Byron is a mar- 
velous illustration of the vicissitudes of lit- 
erary reputation. Only in Greece was pub- 
lic notice taken of it. The brilliancy with 
which his fame burst forth, the unexampled 
rapidity with which it spread through Eu- 
rope, the powerful influence it continued to 
exert on the youth of the next age, were to 
the men who witnessed them sure signs of 
the magnitude of his future renown. The 
decadence into which it has fallen would 
have been incredible to them. It was By- 
ron's distinction to have been the first man 
of letters who enjoyed an international rep- 
utation at once ; and one can hardly credit 
the fact that he has shrunk so wonderfully. 
In the month of his death Sir Walter Scott, 
in a brief article which attracted wide atten- 
tion, said that it seemed almost as if the sun 
in heaven had been extinguished ; and when 
Scott soon followed him, Landor, writing to 



262 BYBON'S CENTENARY. 

Crabb Robinson, remarked that the death of 
these two had " put the fashionable world 
into deep mourning," and drew gloomy pre- 
dictions, in the well-known manner of con- 
temporaries, because the great men were 
leaving no successors. 

Something of the shock of Byron's death 
and of the exaltation of his genius at the 
moment was due to the manner in which he 
met his end ; he had fallen like one of his 
own heroes, died in a cause, and appealed to 
the romantic feeling of the age. Even then, 
however, to admire him was found to be a 
different thing from approving him. When 
the thirty-seven guns had been fired at Mis- 
solonghi, and the Turks had responded with 
" an exultant volley," and the ship had 
brought home the remains, the Abbey was 
refused, and he was buried in the common 
soil of England. Two incidents of the fu- 
neral bring him very near to us. Lady Car- 
oline Lamb met the cortege as she was driv- 
ing, and, on being told, in answer to her 
question, that it was Byron's, fainted in her 
carriage ; and Mary Shelley, as she saw the 
procession winding down, reflected on the 
short-sightedness of human life, asking who 
could have foretold at Lerici such changes 
as she had witnessed in two little years. 



BYBON'S CENTENABY. 263 

Hobhouse, with all his efforts, could raise 
only a thousand pounds for a memorial, but 
with this he got Thorwaldsen to make a 
statue which was sent to England in 1834. 
The Abbey was again refused, and, to the 
discredit of the nation, this work was al- 
lowed to remain stored away in the Custom- 
house eleven years, because no fit place could 
be got to put it in. At last, in 1845, Dr. 
Whewell gave permission to set it up in the 
Library of Trinity, which it still adorns. 
Thirty years later came the miserable fiasco 
of Beaconsfield's Committee, which, far from 
making Newstead Abbey a national posses- 
sion and gathering there the relics of Byron, 
placed in Hamilton Park (other sites being 
refused) that statue of the poet leaning on 
the rocks, with his dog Boatswain beside 
him, which can only be described as popu- 
lar melodrama in stone, beautiful only for 
the mass of red marble which the Greek 
Government gave for its base. It is to be 
remarked, also, that at this time the Abbey 
was a third time practically refused, as Dean 
Stanley, out of respect to the action of his 
two predecessors, but not apparently for any 
other reason, precluded application for erect- 
ing a tablet there by a letter in which he 



264 BYRON'S CENTENARY. 

said he preferred the subject should not be 
brought before him. 

The history of monuments, however, is not 
necessarily proof of fame. Others of Eng- 
land's greatest do not sleep in the Abbey, 
and the hero not infrequently waits for his 
statue a long age. The place of fame is on 
the lips of men, and Macaulay, when Moore's 
Life came out, could speak of Byron as " the 
most celebrated man in Europe." The de- 
cline of his vogue was nevertheless rapid 
and unmistakable. We all remember Car- 
lyle's oracle : " Close thy Byron ; open thy 
Goethe." This must have been about 1840. 
But, unfortunately, as one writer observes, 
to open Goethe is to return to Byron's great- 
ness. Did not Goethe tell Eckermann that 
a man of Byron's eminence would not come 
again, nor such a tragedy as Cain? He 
thought him greater than Milton — " vast 
and widely varied," whereas the latter was 
only simple and stately. Perhaps, as we 
have been told, Goethe was flattered by 
Byron's imitation. 

Whatever was the reason, the critical 
judgment of Goethe is one to be weighed 
with regard to Byron, and to himself also, 
for that matter. What part Goethe's praise 



BYBON'S CENTENARY. 265 

may have had in making Byron the hero 
of " Young Germany " we have no means 
of determining, but his works were vital in 
the new age there, and still his hold seems 
greater on the Germans, if we may judge by 
the test of translations and biography, than 
it is elsewhere on the Continent. Heine 
was more than touched by him, though he 
was far from being his duplicate, and could 
see the humorous side of those young Pa- 
risians — Musset the foremost — who were 
melancholy in the full glow of first man- 
hood, and went about in despair dining 
sumptuously every day. One pities Musset, 
for Byron was, as much as another man can 
be, the secret of his fate. Lamartine caught 
only the sentimentality of Byron, but Mus- 
set assimilated his darker spirit, his reckless- 
ness, and license, and skepticism, and trans- 
muted his very coarseness into a Parisian 
vulgarity. Stendhal and Sainte-Beuve paid 
tribute to him ; and, to cut the subject short, 
Mazzini thanked him in the name of Italy, in 
Spain Espronceda drew his inspiration from 
him, and Castelar, in the later time, eulo- 
gized him for his liberating influences in the 
peninsula with Spanish amplitude of phrase. 
Karl Elze thinks that the Russian poet, 



266 BYRON'S CENTENARY. 

Pushkin, was his child ; if it were so, Byron 
might well be proud of what such an in- 
fluence was the beginning of in Russia. 
This rapid survey, with its brilliant names, 
impresses the mind with the range and 
dominance of this man, although Landor's 
sneer, when he hoped that " the mercies 
which have begun with man's forgetfulness 
may be crowned with God's forgiveness," 
does not now seem so absurd as formerly. 

To look at the matter from this point of 
view, however, is to confuse Byron with By- 
ronism. There was a European mood, a 
temperament of the revolutionary time, that 
fed on Byron, but he was not its creator, 
and to regard him as more than a single in- 
fluence of many that moulded the young 
men of the next generation is to give him 
vastly more than his due. This is the se- 
cret of his vogue in Europe, not that he 
liberated their minds, but that he set the 
fashion for minds expanding in a new age 
of intellectual pride and moral irresponsi- 
bility, helped to form their attitude, and was 
a rallying name for the faction. He was 
licentious, but he was neither democratical 
nor atheistical ; he had no body of opinions 
properly thought out and correlated with so- 



BYRON'S CENTENARY. 267 

cial facts, either in politics or religion ; he 
had no strong convictions even ; but, with 
prejudices of rank and reminiscences of 
Scottish theology from which he could not 
free himself, he was an impulsive and there- 
fore uneven revolter from the old regime, 
and never quite at home in the new camp. 
He preferred, he said, to be beheaded by 
the King and not by the mob ; and the 
whole aristocrat spoke in the saying. Shel- 
ley wrote of him, " The canker of aristoc- 
racy needs to be cut out ; " and he hits off 
Byron's inconsequence in religion where he 
speaks of him under the name of Maddalo, 
and contrasts him with himself. Maddalo, 
he says, took a wicked pleasure in drawing 
out his taunts against religion ; but, he adds, 
" What Maddalo thinks on these matters is 
not exactly known." Byron is believed to 
have talked with Shelley more seriously 
than with any other man. He did not him- 
self know what he thought ; and his state 
of mind was well expressed by his remark 
to Lady Byron, " The trouble is, I do be- 
lieve." In substance, therefore, unlike Shel- 
ley, who was democratical and atheistical 
on principle, Byron was far from being the 
ideal of the various " young " nationalities, 



268 BYBON'S CENTENARY. 

France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, in the 
principal tenets dear to the age. It was 
rather his personality, and what they trans- 
formed him into by their worship, that had 
power over them in their search for "lib- 
erty ; " and truly, though his ideas were in- 
complete and fragmentary, and inextricably 
blended, even in their formation, with his 
impulses and the accidents of his position 
as a pariah of genius, yet there was a con- 
tagion in his spirit, a dash of energy and of 
abandon, that told as blood tells more than 
thought. 

One advantage, too, Byron had with for- 
eign nations that with his own counts as a 
defect. He had no form, no art, no finish ; 
and the poet who failed in these things can 
be read in our day only by a kind of suffer- 
ance, and with continual friction with what 
has come to be our mastering literary taste 
for perfection in the manner. It has been 
said that he consequently bore translation 
better than he otherwise would. His quality 
is power, not charm ; the mood and the situ- 
ation and the thought are the elements that 
count in his poetry, while the words are at 
the best eloquent or witty, but not " the liv- 
ing garment of light." The result was, that 



BYBON'S CENTENARY. 2G9 

he could be given almost completely in a for- 
eign language. This consideration may go 
far to explain the relative estimate of him 
by foreign writers in comparison with other 
English poets ; for these others who have 
the charm that cannot be transfused, the art 
that will obey no master but its own Pros- 
pero, are seen, as one may say, without their 
singing robes ; and their poetry, made prose, 
loses half its excellence. This, together with 
the German element in one portion of his 
work and the strong Italian influence in a 
larger portion, especially in Don Juan, must 
be taken into account in any attempt to un- 
derstand why he was the best known English 
poet on the Continent, and perhaps, with the 
exception of Shakespeare, still is. 

In England, Byron's reputation met with 
rapid decline from natural causes. It is 
not likely that his misconduct in morals was 
much against him, and Beaconsfield was 
wholly on the wrong track when he reminded 
the Byron meeting that, after half a century, 
a man's private life scarcely enters into the 
estimate of his literary genius. It seems 
rather Byron's lack of orthodoxy that Eng- 
land most resented. Society put up with 
much libertinism in those days in high quar- 



270 BYBON'S CENTENARY. 

ters ; but Byron had attacked the faith, or 
at least elements of it, which the Church 
shared in common with Calvinism, and this 
was too shocking a matter for a society 
which found hardly more than matter for 
gossip in natural sons and daughters. This 
was the reason which a bishop alleged in 
the House of Lords in answer to Brougham, 
in the debate on the second refusal of the 
Abbey. Byron had attacked Christianity, 
and he should not be interred " in the Tem- 
ple of our God." The middle classes have 
always rejected Byron, in like manner, be- 
cause he scoffed, though, no doubt, his life 
and the licentious portions of his poetry also 
offended them. From the first his skepti- 
cism was heavily against him, and probably 
it still remains the strongest objection to his 
works in the minds of Englishmen gener- 
ally. In Landor's bitter attack (he had of- 
fended Landor by rhyming his name with 
gander) this charge is made the climax, and 
the passage is brief enough to quote as the 
best word of Byron's enemies : — 

"Afterwards, whenever he wrote a bad 
poem, he supported his sinking fame by 
some signal act of profligacy : an elegy by 
a seduction, a heroic by an adultery, a trag- 



BYRON'S CENTENARY. 271 

edy by a divorce. On the remark of a 
learned man that irregularity is no indi- 
cation of genius, he began to lose ground 
rapidly, when, on a sudden, he cried out at 
the Haymarket, There is no God. It was 
then surmised more generally and more 
gravely that there was something in him, 
and he stood upon his legs almost to the 
last. Say what you will, once whispered 
a friend of mine, there are things in him 
strong as poison and original as sin." This, 
with all its excess, is no inapt character of 
Byron, as English prejudice drew him. 

On the other hand, much that was in 
his favor at first was necessarily temporary. 
The man had a story. He was one of the 
picturesque characters of the age, and while 
he lived he was interesting to his time 
merely for his personal fortunes. It was 
to his gain, too, that he identified his own 
romance with that which he early invented, 
appealing to the adventurous in men and to 
the pity and admiration of women. His he- 
roes are strong, and strength succeeds with 
the sex in fiction as well as in life ; and they 
are, besides, usually faithful in love, while 
their crimes are taken out of the moral re- 
gion of deliberate choice by a kind of emo- 



272 BYRON'S CENTENARY. 

tional sophistry, and somehow are charged 
to their circumstances, so that the unwary 
and innocent reader commiserates their vil- 
lainies instead of being revolted by them. 
These tales (and no part of his work was 
more popular) are hard to read to-day, but 
we forget too readily what raw and bloody 
fiction the world had in the first score years 
of this century; we cannot conceive how 
London ran after stories of blighted brig- 
ands and sentimental corsairs, in the very 
thunder of Waterloo. But so it was, and 
Byron was more interesting in that he was 
the unhappy and noble original from which 
the pirates of his imagination were drawn. 
If he changed the scene and wandered over 
Europe as Childe Harold, he gained in sen- 
timent ; if he wore the mask of Manfred, he 
gained in tragedy ; and if he sneered in Don 
Juan, there was the jaded man of the world, 
perhaps more interesting. He was, more- 
over, a peer; but a dead peer certainly is 
no better than a dead lion, and when he 
died, why, — the fashion in collars changed. 
Other living personalities occupied the stage ; 
England grew steadily more sincere in re- 
ligion, more strict in the standard of pri- 
vate morals, more exacting of seriousness in 



BYRON'S CENTENARY. 273 

thought and of perfection in literary form ; 
and all these influences were adverse to 
Byron, who made no offsetting gain in his 
own country from the revolutionary fervor 
that helped him on the Continent. 

What is there left ? Some stirring pas- 
sages of adventure, some eloquent descrip- 
tions of nature, some personal lyrics of true 
poetic feeling, dramas which, it is to be 
hoped, have finally damned "the unities," 
and one great poem of the modern spirit, 
Don Juan. And what remains of that mel- 
odramatic Byron of women's fancies ? His 
character has come out plain, and we are 
really amazed at it, — proud, sensual, self- 
ish, and, it must be added, mean. Ignoble 
he was, in many ways, but, for all that, the 
energy of his passions, his vitality, his mas- 
terly egotism, and the splendid force of his 
genius, made him a commanding name and 
stamped him upon the succeeding European 
time. He cannot be neglected by history, 
but men certainly appear to pass him by. 
Arnold has endeavored to bring him back 
by a collection ; but Arnold's critical views 
on poetry seem to be justifications in age for 
the tastes he had when he was young, — 
reasons after the act. A late biographer 



274 BYRON'S CENTENARY. 

thinks that the decadence of his fame is due 
to the conservatism of the last half -cen- 
tury, and that in the revolutionary age that 
ought soon to be beginning, he will retrieve 
himself. But can this be hoped of a " revo- 
lutionary " poet whom Swinburne has cast 
aside ? The prediction does not convince us. 
Byronism has gone by, and the age of the 
" enlightenment " in Germany and France ; 
such a mood is not repeated. Goethe out- 
lived Wertherism, but had Byron such good 
fortune? In his own character there are 
such defects as forbid admiration in the 
light of our moral ideas ; and in his poems, 
taken apart from their time, there are other 
defects, both in their substance, and, unques- 
tionably, in their form, which forbid the sort 
of approval that would make them in a true 
sense classic, as a whole, though the quali- 
ties that make Childe Harold and Don Juan 
great, and preserve here and there passages 
in other poems, are those that confer immor- 
tality. He was a poet ; he was a force, also, 
that spent itself partly in creating a world- 
wide affectation, and partly in rousing and 
reinforcing the impulse of individual liberty 
on the Continent ; but he is a poet no one 
can love, and he left a memory that no one 



BYRON'S CENTENARY. 275 

can admire, and there is none of his works 
that receives the meed of perfect praise. 
And, as to the fruits of that vast influence, 
is it hard to say whether they were more 
good than evil ? 



ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 

The death of Browning brings one stage 
nearer the too plainly approaching end of 
a literary age which will long be full of cu- 
rious interest to the student of the moods of 
the mind of man. Time has linked his name 
with that of Tennyson, and the conjunction 
gives to England another of those double 
stars of genius in which her years are rich, 
and by which the spirit of an age has a two- 
fold expression. The old opposition, the 
polarity of mind, by virtue of which the 
Platonist differs from the Aristotelian, the 
artist from the thinker, Shakespeare from 
Jonson, shows its efficacy here, too, in the 
last modern age, and divides the poets and 
their admirers by innate preferences. It is 
needful to remember this contrast, though 
not to insist upon it unduly, in order to ap- 
proach the work of Browning rightly, to be 
just to those who idolize him without of- 
fense to those who are repelled by him. The 
analysis of his powers, the charting of his 



ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 277 

life and work, are not difficult; but the 
value of his real achievement is more uncer- 
tain. Interest centres entirely in his poetry, 
for his career has been without notable inci- 
dent, and is told when it is said that he has 
lived the life of a scholar and man of letters 
in England and Italy amid the social cul- 
ture of his time. For the world, his career 
is the succession of books he has put forth, 
and this is as he would have it ; publicity 
beyond this he did not seek, but refused 
with violence and acrimony. 

In his earliest poem, youthful in its self- 
portraiture, its literary touch, and its fragmen- 
tary plan, the one striking quality is the flow 
of language. Here was a writer who would 
never lack for words ; fluent, as if inexhaus- 
tible, the merely verbal element in Pauline 
shows no struggle with the medium of the 
poet's art. This gift of facility was, as is 
usual, first to show itself. In Paracelsus 
the second primary quality of Browning was 
equally conspicuous, — the power of reason- 
ing in verse. These two traits have for a 
poet as much weakness as strength, and they 
lie at the source of Browning's defects as 
a master of poetic art. His facility allowed 
him to be diffuse in language, and his rea- 



278 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 

soning habit led him often to be diffuse in 
matter. In Sordello the two produced a 
monstrosity, both in construction and ex- 
pression, not to be rivaled in literature. 
Picturesque detail, intellectual interest, moral 
meaning, struggle in vain in that tale to 
make themselves felt and discerned through 
the tangle of words and the labyrinth of act 
and reflection. But already in these poems 
Browning had shown, to himself, if not to 
the world, that he had come to certain con- 
clusions, to a conception of human life and 
a decision as to the use of his art in regard 
to it, which were to give him substantial 
power. He defined it by his absorption in 
Paracelsus with the broad ideas of infinite 
power and infinite love, which in his last 
poem still maintain their place in his sys- 
tem as the highest solvents of experience 
and speculation ; and in Sordello he stated 
the end of art, which he continued to seek, 
in his maxim that little else is worth study 
except the " history of a soul." His entire 
poetic work, broadly speaking, is the illus- 
tration of this short sentence. Such prepos- 
sessions with the spiritual meaning of life 
as these poems show made sure the predom- 
inance in his work of the higher interests of 



ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 279 

man ; and he won his audience finally by 
this fact, that he had something to say that 
was ethical and religious. The develop- 
ment, however, of both the theory and prac- 
tice of his mind had to be realized in far 
more definite and striking forms than the 
earlier poems before the attention of the 
world could be secured. 

It would seem natural that a man with 
such convictions as Browning acknowledged, 
should be preeminently an idealist, and that 
his point of weakness should prove to be the 
tendency to metaphysical and vague matter 
not easily putting on poetical form. But he 
was, in fact, a realist, — one who is primarily 
concerned with things, and uses the method 
of observation. His sense for actual fact is 
always keen. In that poem of Paracelsus, 
which is a discussion in the air if ever 
a poem was, it is significant to find him 
emphasizing the circumstance that he had 
taken very few liberties with his subject, 
and bringing books to show evidence of his- 
torical fidelity. But, little of the dramatic 
spirit as there is in Paracelsus, there was 
much in Browning when it should come to 
be released, and it belongs to the dramatist 
to be interested in the facts of life, the flesh 



280 ON BBOWNING'S DEATH. 

and blood reality, in which he may or may 
not (according to his greatness) find a soul. 
Browning was thus a realist, and he chose 
habitually the objective method of art — but 
to set forth " the history of a soul." Had 
he been an idealist, his subject would have 
been " the history of the soul ; " his method 
might or might not have been different. 
This change of the particle is a slight one, 
but it involves that polarity of mind which 
sets Browning opposite to Tennyson. He 
deals with individuals, takes in imagination 
their point of view, assumes for the time be- 
ing their circumstances and emotions ; and 
one who does this in our time, with a pre- 
occupation with the soul in the individual, 
cannot escape from one overpowering im- 
pression, repeated from every side of the 
modern age, — the impression, namely, of 
the relativity of human life. 

This is the lesson which is spread over 
Browning's pages, with line on line and pre- 
cept on precept. By it he comes into har- 
mony with the very spirit of the century on 
its intellectual side, and represents it. The 
" history of a soul " differs very greatly ac- 
cording to circumstance, native impulses, the 
needs of life at different stages of growth, 



ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 281 

the balance of faculties and desires in it, the 
temperament of its historical period, the 
access to it of art or music or thought, and 
in a thousand ways ; and Browning devotes 
himself oftentimes to the exposition of all 
this web of circumstance, in order that we 
may see the soul as it was under its con- 
ditions, instead of leaping to a conclusion 
by a hard-and-fast morality based upon the 
similarity of the soul in all men. The task 
happily falls in with his fine gift of reason- 
ing, and increases by practice the supple- 
ness and subtlety of this faculty of his. One 
might say, indeed, without close computa- 
tion, that the larger part of his entire poetic 
work is occupied with such reasoning upon 
psychological cases, in the manner of a law- 
yer who educes a client's justification from 
the details of his temptation. Many of the 
longer poems are only instances of special 
pleading, and have all the faults that belong 
to that form of thought. The Ring and the 
Book is such an interminable argument, mar- 
velous for intellectual resource, for skill in 
dialectic, for plausibility. Bishop Blougram, 
Mr. Sludge, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, 
and others, readily occur to mind as being 
in the same way " apologies ; " and in these 



282 ON BBOWNIN&S DEATH. 

one feels that, while it is well to know what 
the prisoner urges on his own behalf, it is 
the shabby, the cowardly, the criminal, the 
base, the detestable, that is masking under 
a too well - woven cloak of words, and that 
the special pleader is pursuing his game at 
the risk of a higher honesty than consists 
in the mere understanding of the mechan- 
ism of motive and act. Yet this catholicity, 
which seems to have for its motto, " Who 
understands all, forgives all," is a natural 
consequence in a mind so impressed with 
the doctrine of the relativity of human life 
as was Browning's. The tendency of the 
doctrine is to efface moral judgment, and to 
substitute for it intellectual comprehension ; 
and usually this results in a practical fa- 
talism, acquiesced in if not actively held. 
Here, too, Browning's mental temperament 
has another point of contact with the gen- 
eral spirit of the age, and allows him to 
take up into his genius the humanitarian 
instinct so powerful in his contemporaries. 
For the perception of the excuses for men's 
action in those of low or morbid or deformed 
development liberalizes the mind, and the 
finding of the spark of soul in such indi- 
viduals does mean to the Christian the find- 



ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 283 

ing of that immortal part which equalizes all 
in an equal destiny, however the difference 
may look between men while the process 
of life is going on. Browning came very 
early to this conviction, that in all men, 
however weak or grossly set this spark may 
be, it is to be sought for. In this he is 
consistently philanthropic and democratic, 
Christian in spirit and practice, comprehen- 
sive in tolerance, large in charity, intellec- 
tually (but not emotionally) sympathetic. 
It is perhaps unnecessary to add that his 
love of righteousness is not so striking a 
trait. 

But what in all this view of life is most 
original in Browning is something that pos- 
sibly perplexes even his devoted admirers. 
Life, he says, no matter what it may be in 
its accidents of time, or place, or action, is 
the stuff to make the soul of. In the hum- 
blest as the noblest, in Caliban as in Pros- 
pero, the life vouchsafed is the means (ade- 
quate, he seems to say, in all cases) of which 
the soul makes use to grow in. He thus 
avoids the deadening conclusions to which 
his doctrine of relativity might lead, by as- 
serting the equal and identical opportunity 
in all to develop the soul. He unites with 



284 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 

this the original theory — at least one that 
he ha3 made his own — that whatever the 
soul seeks it should seek with all its might ; 
and, pushing to the extreme, he urges that 
if a man sin, let him sin to the uttermost of 
his desire. This is the moral of the typical 
poem of this class, The Statue and the Bust, 
and he means more by this than that the 
intention, sinning in thought, is equivalent 
to sinning in act, — he means that a man 
should have his will. No doubt this is 
directly in accord with the great value he 
places on strength of character, vitality in 
life, on resolution, courage, and the braving 
of consequences. But the ignoring of the 
immense value of restraint as an element in 
character is complete ; and in the case of 
many whose choice is slowly and doubtfully 
made in those younger years when the desire 
for life in its fullness of experience is strong- 
est, and the wisdom of knowledge of life in 
its effects is weakest, the advice to obey im- 
pulse at all costs, to throw doubt and au- 
thority to the winds, and u live my life and 
have my day," is of dubious utility. Over 
and over again in Browning's poetry one 
meets with this insistence on the value of 
moments of high excitement, of intense liv- 



ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 285 

ing, of full experience of pleasure, even 
though such moments be of the essence of 
evil and fruitful in all dark consequences. 
It is probable that a deep optimism under- 
lies all this ; that Browning believed that 
the soul does not perish in its wrong-doing, 
but that through this experience, too, as 
through good, it develops finally its im- 
mortal nature, and that, as in his view the 
life of the soul is in its energy of action, the 
man must act even evil if he is to grow 
at all. Optimism, certainly, of the most 
thorough-going kind this is ; but Browning 
is so consistent an optimist in other parts of 
his philosophy that this defense may be 
made for him on a point where the common 
thought and deepest conviction of the race, 
in its noblest thinkers and purest artists, are 
opposed to him, refusing to believe that the 
doing of evil is to be urged in the interest 
of true manliness. 

The discussion of Browning's attitude to- 
wards life in the actual world of men has 
led away from the direct consideration of 
the work in which he embodied his convic- 
tions. The important portion of it came in 
middle life, when he obtained mastery of the 
form of poetic art known as the dramatic 



286 ON BBOWNING'S DEATH. 

monologue. A realist, if he be a poet, must 
resort to the drama. It was inevitable in 
Browning's case. Yet the drama, as a form, 
offered as much unfitness for Browning's 
genius as it did fitness. The drama requires 
energy, it is true, and interest in men as in- 
dividuals ; and these Browning had. It also 
requires concentration, economy of material, 
and constructive power ; and these were dif- 
ficult to Browning. He did not succeed in 
his attempts to write drama in its perfect 
form. He could make fragments of intense 
power in passion ; he could reveal a single 
character at one critical moment of its ca- 
reer ; he could sum up a life history in a 
long soliloquy ; but he could not do more 
than this and keep the same level of per- 
formance. Why he failed is a curious ques- 
tion, and will doubtless be critically debated 
with a plentiful lack of results. His growth 
in dramatic faculty, in apprehension of the 
salient points of character and grasp in pre- 
senting them, in perception of the value of 
situation and power to use it to the full, can 
readily be traced ; but there comes a point 
where the growth stops. Superior as his 
mature work is to that of his youth in all 
these qualities, it falls short of that perfect 



ON BBOWNING'S DEATH. 287 

and complex design and that informing life 
which mark the developed dramatist. In 
the monologues he deals with incidents in 
a life, with moods of a personality, with the 
consciousness which a man has of his own 
character at the end of his career ; but he 
seizes these singly, and at one moment. His 
characters do not develop before the eye; 
he does not catch the soul in the very act ; 
he does not present life so much as the re- 
sults of life. He frequently works by the 
method of retrospect, he tells the story, but 
does not enact it. In all these he displays 
the governing motive of his art, which is to 
reveal the soul ; but if the soul reveals itself 
in his verses, it is commonly by confession, 
not presentation. He has, in fact, that 
malady of thought which interferes with the 
dramatist's control of his hand ; he is think- 
ing about his characters, and only indirectly 
in them, and he is most anxious to convey 
his reflections upon the psychical phenom- 
enon which he is attending to. In other 
words, he is, primarily, a moralist ; he rea- 
sons, and he is fluent in words and fertile in 
thoughts, and so he loses the object itself, 
becomes indirect, full of afterthought and 
parenthesis, and impairs the dramatic effect. 



288 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 

These traits may be observed, in different 
degrees, in many of the poems, even in the 
best. In the dramas themselves the lack of 
constructive power is absolute. Pippa Passes 
is only a succession of dramatic fragments 
artificially bound together, and in the others 
the lack of body and interdependent life be- 
tween the parts is patent to all. In a Bal- 
cony, certainly one of his finest wrought 
poems, is only an incident. He is at his 
best when his field is most narrow — in such 
a poem as The Laboratory. 

There is a compensation for these defi- 
ciencies of power in that the preference of 
his mind for a single passion or mood or 
crisis at its main moment opens to him the 
plain and unobstructed way to lyrical ex- 
pression. His dramatic feeling of the pas- 
sion and the situation supplies an intensity 
which finds its natural course in lyrical ex- 
altation. It may well be thought, if it were 
deemed necessary to decide upon the best 
in Browning's work, that his genius is most 
nobly manifest in those lyrics and romances 
which he called dramatic. The scale rises 
from his argumentative and moralizing verse, 
however employed, through those monologues 
which obey the necessity for greater concen- 



ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 289 

tration as the dramatic element enters into 
them, up to those most powerful and direct 
poems in which the intensity of feeling en- 
forces a lyrical movement and lift ; and 
akin to these last are the songs of love or he- 
roism into which the dramatic element does 
not enter. Indeed, Browning's lyrical gift 
was more perfect than his dramatic gift ; 
he knew the secret of a music which has 
witchery in it independent of what the words 
may say, and when his hand fell on that 
chord, he mastered the heart with real poetic 
charm. It was seldom, however, that this 
happy moment came to him, ennobling his 
language and giving wing to his emotion ; 
and, such poems being rare, it remains true 
that the best of his work is to be sought in 
those pieces, comprehending more of life, 
where his dramatic power takes on a lyrical 
measure. Such work became more infre- 
quent as years went on, and he declined 
again into that earlier style of wordy ratioci- 
nation, of tedious pleading as of a lawsuit, 
of mere intellectuality as of the old hair- 
splitting schoolmen, though he retained the 
strength and definiteness of mind which mere 
growth had brought to him, and he occasion- 
ally produced a poem which was only less 



290 ON BBOWNING'S DEATH. 

good than the best of his middle age. The 
translations from the Greek with which he 
employed his age stand in a different class 
from his original poems, and were a fortunate 
resort for his vigorous but now feebly crea- 
tive mind. At the end he still applied him- 
self to the interpretation of individual lives, 
but in choosing them he was attracted even 
more uniformly by something exceptional, 
often grotesque, in them, and hence they are 
more curious and less instructive than the 
earlier work of the same kind. 

The mass of Browning's writings which 
has been glanced at as the expression of the 
reasoning, the dramatic, or the lyrical im- 
pulse in his genius has attracted attention 
as wide as the English language, and it has 
been intimated that this success has been 
won in some degree on other than poetic 
grounds. It is fair to say, in view of the 
facts, that many who have felt his appeal to 
them have found a teacher rather than a 
poet. Two points in which he reflects his 
age have been mentioned, but there is a 
third point which has perhaps been more 
efficacious than his sense of the relativity of 
human life or his conviction of the worth of 
every human soul : he adds to these cardinal 



ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 291 

doctrines a firm and loudly asseverated re- 
ligious belief. It is the more noteworthy 
because his reasoning faculty might in his 
time have led him almost anywhere rather 
than to the supreme validity of truth arrived 
at by intuition. This makes his character 
the more interesting, for the rationalizing 
mind which submits itself to intuitive faith 
exactly parallels in Browning the realist 
with a predominating interest in the soul. 
There is no true contradiction in this, no in- 
consistency ; but the combination is unusual. 
It is natural that, in a time of decreasing 
authority in formal religion, a poet in Brown- 
ing's position should wield an immense at- 
traction, and owe something, as Carlyle did, 
to the wish of his audience to be reassured 
in their religious faith. Browning had be- 
gun with that resolution of the universe into 
infinite power and infinite love of which 
something has already been said, and he 
continued to teach that through nature we 
arrive at the conception of omnipotence, and 
through the soul at the conception of love, 
and he apparently finds the act of faith in 
the belief that infinite power will finally be 
discerned as the instrument and expression 
of infinite love. This is pure optimism ; and 



292 ON BBOWNING'S DEATH. 

in accordance with it he preaches his gospel, 
which is that each soul should grow to its 
utmost in power and in love, and in the face 
of difficulties — of mysteries in experience 
or thought — should repose with entire trust 
on the doctrine that God has ordered life 
beneficently, and that we who live should 
wait with patience, even in the wreck of our 
own or others' lives, for the disclosure here- 
after which shall reconcile to our eyes and 
hearts the jar with justice and goodness of 
all that has gone before. This is a system 
simple enough and complete enough to live 
by, if it be truly accepted. It is probable, 
however, that Browning wins less by these 
doctrines, which are old and commonplace, 
than by the vigor with which he dogmatizes 
upon them; the certainty with which he 
speaks of such high matters ; the fervor, and 
sometimes the eloquence, with which, touch- 
ing on the deepest and most secret chords of 
the heart's desire, he strikes out the notes of 
courage, of hope and vision, and of the fore- 
tasted triumph. The energy of his own faith 
carries others along with it ; the manliness 
of his own soul infects others with its cheer 
and its delight in the struggle of spiritual 
life on earth ; and all this the more because 



ON BBOWNING'S DEATH. 293 

he is learned in the wisdom of the Rabbis, 
is conversant with modern life and know- 
ledge in all its range, is gifted with intel- 
lectual genius, and yet displays a faith the 
more robust because it is not cloistered, the 
more credible because it is not professional. 
The character of Browning's genius, his 
individual traits, the general substance of 
his thought, do not admit of material mis- 
conception. It is when the question is raised 
upon the permanent value of his work that 
the opportunity for wide divergence arises. 
That there are dreary wastes in it cannot be 
gainsaid. Much is now unreadable that 
was excused in a contemporary book ; much 
never was readable at all ; and of the re- 
mainder how much will the next age in its 
turn cast aside ? Its serious claim to our 
attention on ethical, religious, or intellectual 
grounds may be admitted, without pledging 
the twentieth century, which will have its 
own special phases of thought, and thinkers 
to illustrate them. Browning must live, as 
the other immortals do, by the poetry in 
him. It is true he has enlarged the field of 
poetry by annexing the experience that be- 
longs to the artist and the musician, and has 
made some of his finest and most original 



294 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 

poems out of such motives ; and his wide 
knowledge has served him in other ways, 
though it has stiffened many a page with 
pedantry and antiquarianism. It is true 
that there is a grotesque quality in some of 
his work, but his humor in this kind is really 
a pretense ; no one laughs at it ; it arouses 
only an amazed wonder, like the stone masks 
of some mediaeval church. In all that he 
derived from learning and scholarship there 
is the alloy of mortality ; in all his moraliz- 
ing and special pleading and superfine rea- 
soning there enters the chance that the world 
may lose interest in his treatment of' the 
subject ; in all, except where he sings from 
the heart itself or pictures life directly and 
without comment save of the briefest, there 
is some opportunity for time to breed decay. 
The faith he preached was the poetical com- 
plement of Carlyle's prose, and proceeded 
from much the same grounds and by the 
same steps : believe in God, and act like a 
man — that was the substance of it. But 
Carlyle himself already grows old and harsh. 
The class of mind to which Browning be- 
longs depends on its matter for its life ; un- 
less he has transformed it into poetry, time 
will deal hardly with it. 



ON BBOWNING'S DEATH. 295 

To come to the question which cannot be 
honestly set aside, although it is no longer 
profitable to discuss it, Browning has not 
cared for that poetic form which bestows 
perennial charm, or else he was incapable of 
it. He fails in beauty, in concentration of 
interest, in economy of language, in selec- 
tion of the best from the common treasure 
of experience. In those works where he has 
been most indifferent, as in the Red Cotton 
Night -Cap Country, he has been merely 
whimsical and dull ; in those works where 
the genius he possessed is most felt, as in 
Saul, A Toccata of Galuppi's, Rabbi Ben 
Ezra, The Flight of the Duchess, The 
Bishop Orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's 
Church, Herve Riel, Cavalier Tunes, Time's 
Revenges, and many more, he achieves 
beauty or nobility or fitness of phrase such 
as only a poet is capable of. It is in these 
last pieces and their like that his fame lies 
for the future. It was his lot to be strong 
as the thinker, the moralist with "the ac- 
complishment of verse," the scholar inter- 
ested to rebuild the past of experience, the 
teacher with an explicit dogma to enforce 
in an intellectual form with examples from 
life, the anatomist of human passions, in- 



296 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 

stincts, and impulses in all their gamut, the 
commentator on his own age ; he was weak 
as the artist, and indulged, often unneces- 
sarily and by choice, in the repulsive form 
— in the awkward, the obscure, the ugly. 
He belongs with Jonson, with Dry den, with 
the heirs of the masculine intellect, the men 
of power not unvisited by grace, but in 
whom mind is predominant. Upon the 
work of such poets time hesitates, conscious 
of their mental greatness, but also of their 
imperfect art, their heterogeneous matter; 
at last the good is sifted from that whence 
worth has departed. 



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